Epileptic Seizure Prediction Using Deep Neural Networks Via Transfer Learning and Multi-Feature Fusion

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological diseases, which can seriously affect the patient’s psychological well-being and quality of life. An accurate and reliable seizure prediction system can generate alarm before epileptic seizures to provide patients and their caregivers with sufficient time to take appropriate action. This study proposes an efficient seizure prediction system based on deep learning in order to anticipate the onset of the seizure as early as possible. Handcrafted features extracted based on the prior knowledge and hidden deep features are complementarily fused through the feature fusion module, and then the hybrid features are fed into the multiplicative long short-term memory (MLSTM) to explore the temporal dependency in EEG signals. A one-dimensional channel attention mechanism is implemented to emphasize the more representative information in the multi-channel output of the MLSTM. Finally, a transfer learning strategy is proposed to transfer the weights of the base model trained on the EEG data of all patients to the target patient model, and the latter is then continuously trained using the EEG data of the target patient. The proposed method achieves an average sensitivity of 95.56% and a false positive rate (FPR) of 0.27/h on the SWEC-ETHZ intracranial EEG data. For the more challenging CHB-MIT scalp EEG database, an average sensitivity of 89.47% and a FPR of 0.34/h are obtained. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has good robustness and generalization ability in both intracranial and scalp EEG signals.