Automated diagnosis of epileptic electroencephalogram using independent component analysis and discrete wavelet transform for different electroencephalogram durations

Epilepsy is a disorder of the brain depicted by recurrent seizures. Electroencephalogram signals can be used to study the characteristics of epileptic seizures. In this study, we propose a method for the automated classification of electroencephalogram into normal, interictal and ictal classes using 6, 12, 18 and 23.6 s of data. We employed discrete wavelet transform to decompose electroencephalogram signals into frequency sub-bands. These discrete wavelet transform coefficients were then subjected to independent component analysis for reducing the data dimension. The independent component analysis features were then fed to six classifiers, namely, decision tree, K-nearest neighbor, probabilistic neural network, fuzzy, Gaussian mixture model and support vector machine to select the best classifier. We observed that the support vector machine classifier with radial basis function kernel function gave the best results with an average accuracy of 96%, sensitivity of 96% and specificity of 97% for 23.6 s of electroencephalogram data. Our results show that as the duration of the data increases, the classification accuracy increases. This proposed technique can be used as an automatic seizure monitoring software to aid the doctors in providing timely quality care for the patients suffering from epilepsy.