Amplitude entropy captures chimera resembling behavior in the altered brain dynamics during seizures

Epilepsy is a neurological disease characterized by epileptic seizures, which commonly manifest with pronounced frequency and amplitude changes in the EEG signal. In the case of focal seizures, initially localized pathological activity spreads from a so-called "onset zone" to a wider network of brain areas. Chimeras, defined as states of simultaneously occurring coherent and incoherent dynamics in symmetrically coupled networks are increasingly invoked for characterization of seizures. In particular, chimera-like states have been observed during the transition from a normal (asynchronous) to a seizure (synchronous) network state. However, chimeras in epilepsy have only been investigated with respect to the varying phases of oscillators. We propose a novel method to capture the characteristic pronounced changes in the recorded EEG amplitude during seizures by estimating chimera-like states directly from the signals in a frequency- and time-resolved manner. We test the method on a publicly available intracranial EEG dataset of 16 patients with focal epilepsy. We show that the proposed measure, titled Amplitude Entropy, is sensitive to the altered brain dynamics during seizure, demonstrating its significant increases during seizure as compared to before and after seizure. This finding is robust across patients, their seizures, and different frequency bands. In the future, Amplitude Entropy could serve not only as a feature for seizure detection, but also help in characterizing amplitude chimeras in other networked systems with characteristic amplitude dynamics.

Combining meta and ensemble learning to classify EEG for seizure detection

Despite two decades of extensive research into electroencephalogram (EEG)-based automated seizure detection analysis, the persistent imbalance between seizure and non-seizure categories remains a significant challenge. This study integrated meta-sampling with an ensemble classifier to address the issue of imbalanced classification existing in seizure detection. In this framework, a meta-sampler was employed to autonomously acquire undersampling strategies from EEG data. During each iteration, the meta-sampler interacted with the external environment on a single occasion with the objective of deriving an optimal sampling strategy through this interactive learning process. It was anticipated that optimal sampling strategies would be derived through interactive learning. And then the soft Actor-Critic algorithm was employed to address the non-differentiable optimization issue associated with the meta-sampler. Consequently, this framework adaptively selected training EEG data, and learned effective cascaded integrated classifiers from unbalanced epileptic EEG data. Besides, the time domain, nonlinear and entropy-based EEG features were extracted from five frequency bands (δ, θ, α, β, and γ) and were selected by Semi-JMI to be fed into this imbalanced classification framework. The proposed detection system achieved a sensitivity of 92.58%, a specificity of 92.51%, and an accuracy of 92.52% on the scalp EEG dataset. On the intracranial EEG dataset, the average sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy were 98.56%, 98.82%, and 98.7%, respectively. The experimental comparisons demonstrated that the system outperformed other state-of-the-art methods, and showed robustness in the face of label corruption.

A Survey of Few-Shot Learning for Biomedical Time Series

Advancements in wearable sensor technologies and the digitization of medical records have contributed to the unprecedented ubiquity of biomedical time series data. Data-driven models have tremendous potential to assist clinical diagnosis and improve patient care by improving long-term monitoring capabilities, facilitating early disease detection and intervention, as well as promoting personalized healthcare delivery. However, accessing extensively labeled datasets to train data-hungry deep learning models encounters many barriers, such as long-tail distribution of rare diseases, cost of annotation, privacy and security concerns, data-sharing regulations, and ethical considerations. An emerging approach to overcome the scarcity of labeled data is to augment AI methods with human-like capabilities to leverage past experiences to learn new tasks with limited examples, called few-shot learning. This survey provides a comprehensive review and comparison of few-shot learning methods for biomedical time series applications. The clinical benefits and limitations of such methods are discussed in relation to traditional data-driven approaches. This paper aims to provide insights into the current landscape of few-shot learning for biomedical time series and its implications for future research and applications.

The part and the whole: how single nodes contribute to large-scale phase-locking in functional EEG networks

OBJECTIVE

The application of signal analysis techniques to electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings from epilepsy patients shows that epilepsy involves not only altered neuronal synchronization but also the reorganization of functional EEG networks. This study aims to assess the large-scale phase-locking of such functional networks and how individual network nodes contribute to this collective dynamics.

METHODS

We analyze the EEG recorded before, during and after seizures from sixteen patients with pharmacoresistant focal-onset epilepsy. The data is filtered to low (4-30 Hz) and high (80-150 Hz) frequencies. We define the multivariate phase-locking measure and the univariate phase-locking contribution measure. Surrogate signals are used to estimate baseline results expected under the null hypothesis that the EEG is a correlated linear stochastic process.

RESULTS

On average, nodes from inside and outside the seizure onset zone (SOZ) increase and decrease, respectively, the large-scale phase-locking. This difference becomes most evident in a joint analysis of low and high frequencies.

CONCLUSIONS

Nodes inside and outside the SOZ play opposite roles for the large-scale phase-locking in functional EEG network in epilepsy patients.

SIGNIFICANCE

The application of the phase-locking contribution measure to EEG recordings from epilepsy patients can potentially help in localizing the SOZ.

Dual Attention Relation Network With Fine-Tuning for Few-Shot EEG Motor Imagery Classification

Recently, motor imagery (MI) electroencephalography (EEG) classification techniques using deep learning have shown improved performance over conventional techniques. However, improving the classification accuracy on unseen subjects is still challenging due to intersubject variability, scarcity of labeled unseen subject data, and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In this context, we propose a novel two-way few-shot network able to efficiently learn how to learn representative features of unseen subject categories and classify them with limited MI EEG data. The pipeline includes an embedding module that learns feature representations from a set of signals, a temporal-attention module to emphasize important temporal features, an aggregation-attention module for key support signal discovery, and a relation module for final classification based on relation scores between a support set and a query signal. In addition to the unified learning of feature similarity and a few-shot classifier, our method can emphasize informative features in support data relevant to the query, which generalizes better on unseen subjects. Furthermore, we propose to fine-tune the model before testing by arbitrarily sampling a query signal from the provided support set to adapt to the distribution of the unseen subject. We evaluate our proposed method with three different embedding modules on cross-subject and cross-dataset classification tasks using brain-computer interface (BCI) competition IV 2a, 2b, and GIST datasets. Extensive experiments show that our model significantly improves over the baselines and outperforms existing few-shot approaches.

Deep Learning for Epileptic Seizure Detection Using a Causal-Spatio-Temporal Model Based on Transfer Entropy

Drug-resistant epilepsy is frequent, persistent, and brings a heavy economic burden to patients and their families. Traditional epilepsy detection methods ignore the causal relationship of seizures and focus on a single time or spatial dimension, and the effect varies greatly in different patients. Therefore, it is necessary to research accurate automatic detection technology of epilepsy in different patients. We propose a causal-spatio-temporal graph attention network (CSTGAT), which uses transfer entropy (TE) to construct a causal graph between multiple channels, combining graph attention network (GAT) and bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) to capture temporal dynamic correlation and spatial topological structure information. The accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity of the SWEZ dataset were 97.24%, 97.92%, and 98.11%. The accuracy of the private dataset reached 98.55%. The effectiveness of each module was proven through ablation experiments and the impact of different network construction methods was compared. The experimental results indicate that the causal relationship network constructed by TE could accurately capture the information flow of epileptic seizures, and GAT and BiLSTM could capture spatiotemporal dynamic correlations. This model accurately captures causal relationships and spatiotemporal correlations on two datasets, and it overcomes the variability of epileptic seizures in different patients, which may contribute to clinical surgical planning.

Hyperdimensional computing: A fast, robust, and interpretable paradigm for biological data

Advances in bioinformatics are primarily due to new algorithms for processing diverse biological data sources. While sophisticated alignment algorithms have been pivotal in analyzing biological sequences, deep learning has substantially transformed bioinformatics, addressing sequence, structure, and functional analyses. However, these methods are incredibly data-hungry, compute-intensive, and hard to interpret. Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) has recently emerged as an exciting alternative. The key idea is that random vectors of high dimensionality can represent concepts such as sequence identity or phylogeny. These vectors can then be combined using simple operators for learning, reasoning, or querying by exploiting the peculiar properties of high-dimensional spaces. Our work reviews and explores HDC's potential for bioinformatics, emphasizing its efficiency, interpretability, and adeptness in handling multimodal and structured data. HDC holds great potential for various omics data searching, biosignal analysis, and health applications.

Energy-Efficient Sleep Apnea Detection Using a Hyperdimensional Computing Framework Based on Wearable Bracelet Photoplethysmography

OBJECTIVE

Sleep apnea syndrome (SAS) is a common sleep disorder, which has been shown to be an important contributor to major neurocognitive and cardiovascular sequelae. Considering current diagnostic strategies are limited with bulky medical devices and high examination expenses, a large number of cases go undiagnosed. To enable large-scale screening for SAS, wearable photoplethysmography (PPG) technologies have been used as an early detection tool. However, existing algorithms are energy-intensive and require large amounts of memory resources, which are believed to be the major drawbacks for further promotion of wearable devices for SAS detection.

METHODS

In this paper, an energy-efficient method of SAS detection based on hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is proposed. Inspired by the phenomenon of chunking in cognitive psychology as a memory mechanism for improving working memory efficiency, we proposed a one-dimensional block local binary pattern (1D-BlockLBP) encoding scheme combined with HDC to preserve dominant dynamical and temporal characteristics of pulse rate signals from wearable PPG devices.

RESULTS

Our method achieved 70.17 % accuracy in sleep apnea segment detection, which is comparable with traditional machine learning methods. Additionally, our method achieves up to 67× lower memory footprint, 68× latency reduction, and 93× energy saving on the ARM Cortex-M4 processor.

CONCLUSION

The simplicity of hypervector operations in HDC and the novel 1D-BlockLBP encoding effectively preserve pulse rate signal characteristics with high computational efficiency.

SIGNIFICANCE

This work provides a scalable solution for long-term home-based monitoring of sleep apnea, enhancing the feasibility of consistent patient care.

From basic sciences and engineering to epileptology: A translational approach

Collaborative efforts between basic scientists, engineers, and clinicians are enabling translational epileptology. In this article, we summarize the recent advances presented at the International Conference for Technology and Analysis of Seizures (ICTALS 2022): (1) novel developments of structural magnetic resonance imaging; (2) latest electroencephalography signal-processing applications; (3) big data for the development of clinical tools; (4) the emerging field of hyperdimensional computing; (5) the new generation of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled neuroprostheses; and (6) the use of collaborative platforms to facilitate epilepsy research translation. We highlight the promise of AI reported in recent investigations and the need for multicenter data-sharing initiatives.

Nonequilibrium indicator for the onset of epileptic seizure

The occurrence of spontaneous bursts of uncontrolled electrical activity between neurons can disrupt normal brain function and lead to epileptic seizures. Despite extensive research, the mechanisms underlying seizure onset remain unclear. This study investigates the onset of seizures from the perspective of nonequilibrium statistical physics. By analyzing the probability flux within the framework of the nonequilibrium potential-flux landscape, we establish a connection between seizure dynamics and nonequilibrium. Our findings demonstrate that the degree of nonequilibrium is sensitive to the onset of epileptic seizures. This result offers an alternative perspective on assessing seizure onset in epilepsy.

Six-Center Assessment of CNN-Transformer with Belief Matching Loss for Patient-Independent Seizure Detection in EEG

Neurologists typically identify epileptic seizures from electroencephalograms (EEGs) by visual inspection. This process is often time-consuming, especially for EEG recordings that last hours or days. To expedite the process, a reliable, automated, and patient-independent seizure detector is essential. However, developing a patient-independent seizure detector is challenging as seizures exhibit diverse characteristics across patients and recording devices. In this study, we propose a patient-independent seizure detector to automatically detect seizures in both scalp EEG and intracranial EEG (iEEG). First, we deploy a convolutional neural network with transformers and belief matching loss to detect seizures in single-channel EEG segments. Next, we extract regional features from the channel-level outputs to detect seizures in multi-channel EEG segments. At last, we apply post-processing filters to the segment-level outputs to determine seizures' start and end points in multi-channel EEGs. Finally, we introduce the minimum overlap evaluation scoring as an evaluation metric that accounts for minimum overlap between the detection and seizure, improving upon existing assessment metrics. We trained the seizure detector on the Temple University Hospital Seizure (TUH-SZ) dataset and evaluated it on five independent EEG datasets. We evaluate the systems with the following metrics: sensitivity (SEN), precision (PRE), and average and median false positive rate per hour (aFPR/h and mFPR/h). Across four adult scalp EEG and iEEG datasets, we obtained SEN of 0.617-1.00, PRE of 0.534-1.00, aFPR/h of 0.425-2.002, and mFPR/h of 0-1.003. The proposed seizure detector can detect seizures in adult EEGs and takes less than 15[Formula: see text]s for a 30[Formula: see text]min EEG. Hence, this system could aid clinicians in reliably identifying seizures expeditiously, allocating more time for devising proper treatment.

Reliability of visual review of intracranial electroencephalogram in identifying the seizure onset zone: A systematic review and implications for the accuracy of automated methods

Visual review of intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) is often an essential component for defining the zone of resection for epilepsy surgery. Unsupervised approaches using machine and deep learning are being employed to identify seizure onset zones (SOZs). This prompts a more comprehensive understanding of the reliability of visual review as a reference standard. We sought to summarize existing evidence on the reliability of visual review of iEEG in defining the SOZ for patients undergoing surgical workup and understand its implications for algorithm accuracy for SOZ prediction. We performed a systematic literature review on the reliability of determining the SOZ by visual inspection of iEEG in accordance with best practices. Searches included MEDLINE, Embase, Cochrane Library, and Web of Science on May 8, 2022. We included studies with a quantitative reliability assessment within or between observers. Risk of bias assessment was performed with QUADAS-2. A model was developed to estimate the effect of Cohen kappa on the maximum possible accuracy for any algorithm detecting the SOZ. Two thousand three hundred thirty-eight articles were identified and evaluated, of which one met inclusion criteria. This study assessed reliability between two reviewers for 10 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy and found a kappa of .80. These limited data were used to model the maximum accuracy of automated methods. For a hypothetical algorithm that is 100% accurate to the ground truth, the maximum accuracy modeled with a Cohen kappa of .8 ranged from .60 to .85 (F-2). The reliability of reviewing iEEG to localize the SOZ has been evaluated only in a small sample of patients with methodologic limitations. The ability of any algorithm to estimate the SOZ is notably limited by the reliability of iEEG interpretation. We acknowledge practical limitations of rigorous reliability analysis, and we propose design characteristics and study questions to further investigate reliability.

Epileptic Seizure Detection With Patient-Specific Feature and Channel Selection for Low-power Applications

An accurate epileptic seizure detector using intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings, suitable for low-power wearable/implantable applications, is presented. Eleven time-domain features with low hardware complexity are employed in the feature pool of the seizure detector. A novel two-step feature ranking algorithm based on maximum discrimination minimum redundancy (MDMR) is proposed to identify the most discriminating features in a patient-specific manner during a training phase. Subsequently, the top-ranked features are extracted in a two-stage energy-efficient architecture in which the second stage is activated by a controller to avoid unnecessary energy consumption imposed by multiple feature extraction during the long period of non-seizure states. The effective number of features which are continuously extracted is reduced in this work. Moreover, a patient-specific data reduction technique which selects the most informative and discriminating iEEG channels is also proposed. The presented channel selection technique reaches 68% data reduction on average for the tested patients and reduces the computational complexity. The proposed algorithm is implemented on Cyclone V FPGA of Terasic DE10-standard board. It is tested on twelve patients with short-term and long-term seizures from the Bern Inselspital dataset. The FPGA implementation results reveal an excellent sensitivity of 100% for all patients and remarkable specificity and detection delay improvement compared to the state-of-the-art. The average dynamic power consumption is 0.49 mW which is in the acceptable range for low-power wearable/implantable applications. In addition, a new figure-of-merit (FoM_SD) is defined to consider the major parameters of the seizure detectors. The outstanding FoM_SD of this work is 0.464 which outperforms the state-of-the-art.

Decoding Intracranial EEG With Machine Learning: A Systematic Review

Advances in intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) and neurophysiology have enabled the study of previously inaccessible brain regions with high fidelity temporal and spatial resolution. Studies of iEEG have revealed a rich neural code subserving healthy brain function and which fails in disease states. Machine learning (ML), a form of artificial intelligence, is a modern tool that may be able to better decode complex neural signals and enhance interpretation of these data. To date, a number of publications have applied ML to iEEG, but clinician awareness of these techniques and their relevance to neurosurgery, has been limited. The present work presents a review of existing applications of ML techniques in iEEG data, discusses the relative merits and limitations of the various approaches, and examines potential avenues for clinical translation in neurosurgery. One-hundred-seven articles examining artificial intelligence applications to iEEG were identified from 3 databases. Clinical applications of ML from these articles were categorized into 4 domains: i) seizure analysis, ii) motor tasks, iii) cognitive assessment, and iv) sleep staging. The review revealed that supervised algorithms were most commonly used across studies and often leveraged publicly available timeseries datasets. We conclude with recommendations for future work and potential clinical applications.

Engineering nonlinear epileptic biomarkers using deep learning and Benford's law

In this study, we designed two deep neural networks to encode 16 features for early seizure detection in intracranial EEG and compared them and their frequency responses to 16 widely used engineered metrics to interpret their properties: epileptogenicity index (EI), phase locked high gamma (PLHG), time and frequency domain Cho Gaines distance (TDCG, FDCG), relative band powers, and log absolute band powers (from alpha, beta, theta, delta, low gamma, and high gamma bands). The deep learning models were pretrained for seizure identification on the time and frequency domains of 1 s, single-channel clips of 127 seizures (from 25 different subjects) using "leave-one-out" (LOO) cross validation. Each neural network extracted unique feature spaces that were interpreted using spectral power modulations before being used to train a Random Forest Classifier (RFC) for seizure identification. The Gini Importance of each feature was calculated from the pretrained RFC, enabling the most significant features (MSFs) for each task to be identified. The MSFs were extracted to train another RFC for UPenn and Mayo Clinic's Seizure Detection Kaggle Challenge. They obtained an AUC score of 0.93, demonstrating a transferable method to identify and interpret biomarkers for seizure detection.

Automatic Diagnosis of Epileptic Seizures in EEG Signals Using Fractal Dimension Features and Convolutional Autoencoder Method

This paper proposes a new method for epileptic seizure detection in electroencephalography (EEG) signals using nonlinear features based on fractal dimension (FD) and a deep learning (DL) model. Firstly, Bonn and Freiburg datasets were used to perform experiments. The Bonn dataset consists of binary and multi-class classification problems, and the Freiburg dataset consists of two-class EEG classification problems. In the preprocessing step, all datasets were prepossessed using a Butterworth band pass filter with 0.5–60 Hz cut-off frequency. Then, the EEG signals of the datasets were segmented into different time windows. In this section, dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT) was used to decompose the EEG signals into the different sub-bands. In the following section, in order to feature extraction, various FD techniques were used, including Higuchi (HFD), Katz (KFD), Petrosian (PFD), Hurst exponent (HE), detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA), Sevcik, box counting (BC), multiresolution box-counting (MBC), Margaos-Sun (MSFD), multifractal DFA (MF-DFA), and recurrence quantification analysis (RQA). In the next step, the minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) technique was used for feature selection. Finally, the k-nearest neighbors (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), and convolutional autoencoder (CNN-AE) were used for the classification step. In the classification step, the K-fold cross-validation with k = 10 was employed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the classifier methods. The experiment results show that the proposed CNN-AE method achieved an accuracy of 99.736% and 99.176% for the Bonn and Freiburg datasets, respectively.

Systematic Assessment of Hyperdimensional Computing for Epileptic Seizure Detection

Hyperdimensional computing is a promising novel paradigm for low-power embedded machine learning. It has been applied on different biomedical applications, and particularly on epileptic seizure detection. Unfortunately, due to differences in data preparation, segmentation, encoding strategies, and performance metrics, results are hard to compare, which makes building upon that knowledge difficult. Thus, the main goal of this work is to perform a systematic assessment of the HD computing framework for the detection of epileptic seizures, comparing different feature approaches mapped to HD vectors. More precisely, we test two previously implemented features as well as several novel approaches with HD computing on epileptic seizure detection. We evaluate them in a comparable way, i.e., with the same preprocessing setup and with identical performance measures. We use two different datasets in order to assess the generalizability of our conclusions. The systematic assessment involved three primary aspects relevant for potential wearable implementations: 1) detection performance, 2) memory requirements, and 3) computational complexity. Our analysis shows a significant difference in detection performance between approaches, but also that the ones with the highest performance might not be ideal for wearable applications due to their high memory or computational requirements. Furthermore, we evaluate a post-processing strategy to adjust the predictions to the dynamics of epileptic seizures, showing that performance is significantly improved in all the approaches and also that after post-processing, differences in performance are much smaller between approaches.

Q-PPG: Energy-Efficient PPG-Based Heart Rate Monitoring on Wearable Devices

Hearth Rate (HR) monitoring is increasingly performed in wrist-worn devices using low-cost photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors. However, Motion Artifacts (MAs) caused by movements of the subject's arm affect the performance of PPG-based HR tracking. This is typically addressed coupling the PPG signal with acceleration measurements from an inertial sensor. Unfortunately, most standard approaches of this kind rely on hand-tuned parameters, which impair their generalization capabilities and their applicability to real data in the field. In contrast, methods based on deep learning, despite their better generalization, are considered to be too complex to deploy on wearable devices. In this work, we tackle these limitations, proposing a design space exploration methodology to automatically generate a rich family of deep Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs) for HR monitoring, all derived from a single "seed" model. Our flow involves a cascade of two Neural Architecture Search (NAS) tools and a hardware-friendly quantizer, whose combination yields both highly accurate and extremely lightweight models. When tested on the PPG-Dalia dataset, our most accurate model sets a new state-of-the-art in Mean Absolute Error. Furthermore, we deploy our TCNs on an embedded platform featuring a STM32WB55 microcontroller, demonstrating their suitability for real-time execution. Our most accurate quantized network achieves 4.41 Beats Per Minute (BPM) of Mean Absolute Error (MAE), with an energy consumption of 47.65 mJ and a memory footprint of 412 kB. At the same time, the smallest network that obtains a MAE 8 BPM, among those generated by our flow, has a memory footprint of 1.9 kB and consumes just 1.79 mJ per inference.

Convolutional neural networks for decoding electroencephalography responses and visualizing trial by trial changes in discriminant features

BACKGROUND

Deep learning has revolutionized the field of computer vision, where convolutional neural networks (CNNs) extract complex patterns of information from large datasets. The use of deep networks in neuroscience is mainly focused to neuroimaging or brain computer interface -BCI- applications. In electroencephalography (EEG) research, multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) mainly relies on linear algorithms, which require a homogeneous dataset and assume that discriminant features appear at consistent latencies and electrodes across trials. However, neural responses may shift in time or space during an experiment, resulting in under-estimation of discriminant features. Here, we aimed at using CNNs to classify EEG responses to external stimuli, by taking advantage of time- and space- unlocked neural activity, and at examining how discriminant features change over the course of an experiment, on a trial by trial basis.

NEW METHOD

We present a novel pipeline, consisting of data augmentation, CNN training, and feature visualization techniques, fine-tuned for MVPA on EEG data.

RESULTS

Our pipeline provides high classification performance and generalizes to new datasets. Additionally, we show that the features identified by the CNN for classification are electrophysiologically interpretable and can be reconstructed at the single-trial level to study trial-by-trial evolution of class-specific discriminant activity.

COMPARISON WITH EXISTING TECHNIQUES

The developed pipeline was compared to commonly used MVPA algorithms like logistic regression and support vector machines, as well as to shallow and deep convolutional neural networks. Our approach yielded significantly higher classification performance than existing MVPA techniques (p = 0.006) and comparable results to other CNNs for EEG data.

CONCLUSION

In summary, we present a novel deep learning pipeline for MVPA of EEG data, that can extract trial-by-trial discriminative activity in a data-driven way.

Deep Learning-Enabled Resolution-Enhancement in Mini- and Regular Microscopy for Biomedical Imaging

Artificial intelligence algorithms that aid mini-microscope imaging are attractive for numerous applications. In this paper, we optimize artificial intelligence techniques to provide clear, and natural biomedical imaging. We demonstrate that a deep learning-enabled super-resolution method can significantly enhance the spatial resolution of mini-microscopy and regular-microscopy. This data-driven approach trains a generative adversarial network to transform low-resolution images into super-resolved ones. Mini-microscopic images and regular-microscopic images acquired with different optical microscopes under various magnifications are collected as our experimental benchmark datasets. The only input to this generative-adversarial-network-based method are images from the datasets down-sampled by the Bicubic interpolation. We use independent test set to evaluate this deep learning approach with other deep learning-based algorithms through qualitative and quantitative comparisons. To clearly present the improvements achieved by this generative-adversarial-network-based method, we zoom into the local features to explore and highlight the qualitative differences. We also employ the peak signal-to-noise ratio and the structural similarity, to quantitatively compare alternative super-resolution methods. The quantitative results illustrate that super-resolution images obtained from our approach with interpolation parameter α=0.25 more closely match those of the original high-resolution images than to those obtained by any of the alternative state-of-the-art method. These results are significant for fields that use microscopy tools, such as biomedical imaging of engineered living systems. We also utilize this generative adversarial network-based algorithm to optimize the resolution of biomedical specimen images and then generate three-dimensional reconstruction, so as to enhance the ability of three-dimensional imaging throughout the entire volumes for spatial-temporal analyses of specimen structures.

A channel independent generalized seizure detection method for pediatric epileptic seizures

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

Epilepsy the disorder of the central nervous system has its worldwide presence in roughly 50 million people as estimated by the World Health Organization. Electroencephalogram (EEG) is one of the most common and non-invasive ways of analyzing and studying the subtle changes in neuronal activity of the brain during an epileptic seizure attack. These changes can be analyzed for developing an automated system that would assert the chances of an impending seizure. As changeable nature of seizure affects the patients from having a normal life, hence progress in developing new methods will improve the quality of life and also provide assistance in the medical sector. Objective of the proposed method is to avoid EEG channel selection and use all input EEG channel features to design a generalized epileptic seizure detection framework.

METHOD

In this work, a long short-term memory network has been proposed that is not complex and has the capability of effectively detecting epileptic seizures from both non-invasive and invasive electroencephalogram recordings. The proposed framework is simple and effective and designed in such capacity that raw electroencephalogram signals can be used to detect seizures. Also, a generalized approach has been followed that is channel independent such that EEG signals belonging to any hemisphere of the brain can be detected effectively by the proposed architecture.

RESULTS

The automated seizure detection system achieved high seizure detection sensitivity of 99.9%, and a low false-positive rate of 0.003 per hour for the Children's Hospital Boston-Massachusetts Institute of Technology dataset. While for the Sleep-Wake-Epilepsy-Center of the University Department of Neurology at the Inselspital Bern dataset, the sensitivity is 99.4% and false-positive rate of 0.006 per hour. Convergence analysis of the proposed model provides a significant amount of reliability and correctness in the efficient detection of epileptic seizures.

CONCLUSION

Assessment of the proposed framework on non-invasive as well as invasive EEG signals showed that the framework worked well for different type of EEG recordings as different metrics gave satisfactory results. As the framework is simple and did not require any additional parameter optimization techniques, it reduced the processing overheads without affecting the accuracy. Hence, it can be used as an efficient method for monitoring epileptic seizures.

A Primer on Hyperdimensional Computing for iEEG Seizure Detection

A central challenge in today's care of epilepsy patients is that the disease dynamics are severely under-sampled in the currently typical setting with appointment-based clinical and electroencephalographic examinations. Implantable devices to monitor electrical brain signals and to detect epileptic seizures may significantly improve this situation and may inform personalized treatment on an unprecedented scale. These implantable devices should be optimized for energy efficiency and compact design. Energy efficiency will ease their maintenance by reducing the time of recharging, or by increasing the lifetime of their batteries. Biological nervous systems use an extremely small amount of energy for information processing. In recent years, a number of methods, often collectively referred to as brain-inspired computing, have also been developed to improve computation in non-biological hardware. Here, we give an overview of one of these methods, which has in particular been inspired by the very size of brains' circuits and termed hyperdimensional computing. Using a tutorial style, we set out to explain the key concepts of hyperdimensional computing including very high-dimensional binary vectors, the operations used to combine and manipulate these vectors, and the crucial characteristics of the mathematical space they inhabit. We then demonstrate step-by-step how hyperdimensional computing can be used to detect epileptic seizures from intracranial electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings with high energy efficiency, high specificity, and high sensitivity. We conclude by describing potential future clinical applications of hyperdimensional computing for the analysis of EEG and non-EEG digital biomarkers.

An Ensemble of Hyperdimensional Classifiers: Hardware-Friendly Short-Latency Seizure Detection With Automatic iEEG Electrode Selection

We propose a new algorithm for detecting epileptic seizures. Our algorithm first extracts three features, namely mean amplitude, line length, and local binary patterns that are fed to an ensemble of classifiers using hyperdimensional (HD) computing. These features are embedded into prototype vectors representing ictal (during seizures) and interictal (between seizures) brain states are constructed. These vectors can be computed at different spatial scales ranging from a single electrode up to many electrodes. This flexibility allows our algorithm to identify the electrodes that discriminate best between ictal and interictal brain states. We assess our algorithm on the SWEC-ETHZ iEEG dataset that includes 99 short-time iEEG seizures recorded with 36 to 100 electrodes from 16 drug-resistant epilepsy patients. Using k-fold cross-validation and all electrodes, our algorithm surpasses state-of-the-art algorithms yielding significantly shorter latency (8.81 s vs. 11.57 s) in seizure onset detection, and higher specificity (97.31% vs. 94.84%) and accuracy (96.85% vs. 95.42%). We can further reduce the latency of our algorithm to 3.74 s by allowing a slightly higher percentage of false alarms (2% specificity loss). Using only the top 10% of the electrodes ranked by our algorithm, we still maintain superior latency, sensitivity, and specificity compared to the other algorithms with all the electrodes. We finally demonstrate the suitability of our algorithm to deployment on low-cost embedded hardware platforms, thanks to its robustness to noise/artifacts affecting the signal, its low computational complexity, and the small memory-footprint on a RISC-V microcontroller.

A sparse multiscale nonlinear autoregressive model for seizure prediction

Objectives.Accurate seizure prediction is highly desirable for medical interventions such as responsive electrical stimulation. We aim to develop a classification model that can predict seizures by identifying preictal states, i.e. the precursor of a seizure, based on multi-channel intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) signals.Approach.A two-level sparse multiscale classification model was developed to classify interictal and preictal states from iEEG data. In the first level, short time-scale linear dynamical features were extracted as autoregressive (AR) model coefficients; arbitrary (usually long) time-scale linear and nonlinear dynamical features were extracted as Laguerre-Volterra AR model coefficients; root-mean-square error of model prediction was used as a feature representing model unpredictability. In the second level, all features were fed into a sparse classifier to discriminate the iEEG data between interictal and preictal states.Main results. The two-level model can accurately classify seizure states using iEEG data recorded from ten canine and human subjects. Adding arbitrary (usually long) time-scale and nonlinear features significantly improves model performance compared with the conventional AR modeling approach. There is a high degree of variability in the types of features contributing to seizure prediction across different subjects.Significance. This study suggests that seizure generation may involve distinct linear/nonlinear dynamical processes caused by different underlying neurobiological mechanisms. It is necessary to build patient-specific classification models with a wide range of dynamical features.