An end-to-end seizure prediction approach using long short-term memory network

There are increasing epilepsy patients suffering from the pain of seizure onsets, and effective prediction of seizures could improve their quality of life. To obtain high sensitivity for epileptic seizure prediction, current studies generally need complex feature extraction operations, which heavily depends on the artificial experience (or domain knowledge) and is highly subjective. To address these issues, in this paper we propose an end-to-end epileptic seizure prediction approach based on the long short-term memory network (LSTM). In the new method, only the gamma band of raw electroencephalography (EEG) signals is extracted as network input directly for seizure prediction, thus avoiding subjective and expensive feature design process. Despite its simplicity, the proposed method achieves the mean sensitivity of 91.76% and false prediction rate (FPR) of 0.29/h on Children's Hospital Boston-MIT (CHB-MIT) scalp EEG Database, respectively, when identifying the preictal stage from the EEG signals. Furthermore, different from traditional methods that only consider the classification of preictal and interictal EEG, we introduce the postictal stage as an extra class in the proposed method. As a result, the performance of seizure prediction is further improved, obtaining a higher sensitivity of 92.17% and a low FPR of 0.27/h. The mean warning time is 44.46 min, which suggests that sufficient time is reserved for patients to take intervention measures by this prediction method.