EEG-Based Classification of Epileptic Seizure Types Using Deep Network Model

Accurately identifying the seizure type is vital in the treatment plan and drug prescription for epileptic patients. The most commonly adopted test for identifying epileptic seizures is electroencephalography (EEG). EEG signals include important information about the brain’s electrical activities and are widely used for epilepsy analysis. Among various deep network architectures, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used for EEG signal representation learning for epilepsy analysis. However, most of the existing CNN-based methods suffer from the overfitting problem due to a small number of EEG trials and the huge number of learnable parameters. This paper introduces the design of an efficient, lightweight, and expressive deep network model based on ResNet theory and long short-term memory (LSTM) for classifying seizure types from EEG trials. A 1D ResNet module is adopted to train a deeper network without encountering vanishing gradient problems and to avoid the overfitting problem of CNN models. The LSTM module encodes and learns long-term dependencies over time. The synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) is applied to balance the data by increasing the trials of minority classes. The proposed method was evaluated using the public domain benchmark TUH database. Experimental results revealed the superior performance of the proposed model over other state-of-the-art models with an F1-score of 97.4%. The proposed deep learning model will help neurologists precisely interpret and classify epileptic seizure types and enhance the patient’s life.