Salim Rukhsar

Salim Rukhsar, Anil Kumar Tiwari

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a widely used tool for diagnosing brain disorders due to its high temporal resolution, non-invasive nature, and affordability. Manual analysis of EEG is labor-intensive and requires expertise, making automatic EEG interpretation crucial for reducing workload and accurately assessing seizures. In epilepsy diagnosis, prolonged EEG monitoring generates extensive data, often spanning hours, days, or even weeks. While machine learning techniques for automatic EEG interpretation have advanced significantly in recent decades, there remains a gap in its ability to efficiently analyze large datasets with a balance of accuracy and computational efficiency. To address the challenges mentioned above, an Attention Recurrent Neural Network (ARNN) is proposed that can process a large amount of data efficiently and accurately. This ARNN cell recurrently applies attention layers along a sequence and has linear complexity with the sequence length and leverages parallel computation by processing multi-channel EEG signals rather than single-channel signals. In this architecture, the attention layer is a computational unit that efficiently applies self-attention and cross-attention mechanisms to compute a recurrent function over a wide number of state vectors and input signals. This framework is inspired in part by the attention layer and long short-term memory (LSTM) cells, but it scales this typical cell up by several orders to parallelize for multi-channel EEG signals. It inherits the advantages of attention layers and LSTM gate while avoiding their respective drawbacks. The model's effectiveness is evaluated through extensive experiments with heterogeneous datasets, including the CHB-MIT and UPenn and Mayo's Clinic datasets.

Salim Rukhsar, Anil K. Tiwari

Background: Epilepsy is a neurological illness affecting the brain that makes people more likely to experience frequent, spontaneous seizures. There has to be an accurate automated method for measuring seizure frequency and severity in order to assess the efficacy of pharmacological therapy for epilepsy. The drug quantities are often derived from patient reports which may cause significant issues owing to inadequate or inaccurate descriptions of seizures and their frequencies. Methods and materials: This study proposes a novel deep learning architecture based lightweight convolution transformer (LCT). The transformer is able to learn spatial and temporal correlated information simultaneously from the multi-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) signal to detect seizures at smaller segment lengths. In the proposed model, the lack of translation equivariance and localization of ViT is reduced using convolution tokenization, and rich information from the transformer encoder is extracted by sequence pooling instead of the learnable class token. Results: Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model of cross-patient learning can effectively detect seizures from the raw EEG signals. The accuracy and F1-score of seizure detection in the cross-patient case on the CHB-MIT dataset are shown to be 96.31% and 96.32%, respectively, at 0.5 sec segment length. In addition, the performance metrics show that the inclusion of inductive biases and attention-based pooling in the model enhances the performance and reduces the number of transformer encoder layers, which significantly reduces the computational complexity. In this research work, we provided a novel approach to enhance efficiency and simplify the architecture for multi-channel automated seizure detection.