Application of Machine Learning in Epileptic Seizure Detection

Epileptic seizure is a neurological condition caused by short and unexpectedly occurring electrical disruptions in the brain. It is estimated that roughly 60 million individuals worldwide have had an epileptic seizure. Experiencing an epileptic seizure can have serious consequences for the patient. Automatic seizure detection on electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings is essential due to the irregular and unpredictable nature of seizures. By thoroughly analyzing EEG records, neurophysiologists can discover important information and patterns, and proper and timely treatments can be provided for the patients. This research presents a novel machine learning-based approach for detecting epileptic seizures in EEG signals. A public EEG dataset from the University of Bonn was used to validate the approach. Meaningful statistical features were extracted from the original data using discrete wavelet transform analysis, then the relevant features were selected using feature selection based on the binary particle swarm optimizer. This facilitated the reduction of 75% data dimensionality and 47% computational time, which eventually sped up the classification process. After having been selected, relevant features were used to train different machine learning models, then hyperparameter optimization was utilized to further enhance the models’ performance. The results achieved up to 98.4% accuracy and showed that the proposed method was very effective and practical in detecting seizure presence in EEG signals. In clinical applications, this method could help relieve the suffering of epilepsy patients and alleviate the workload of neurologists.