2018 17th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications
Automatic Seizure Detection via an Optimized
Image-based Deep Feature Learning
Ibrahim Alkanhal B.V.K Vijaya Kumar
ialkanha@cmu.edu kumar@ece.cmu.edu
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, USA
Abstract—In this paper, our goal is to find an optimized
approach that can learn features from multichannel EEG time-
series data to perform automatic seizure detection. In general, it
is not easy to learn robust features from EEG signals due to the
variations in both intra and inter-patient variability. However,
to achieve good generalization, we use an algorithm that tries to
capture spectral, temporal and spatial information, in contrast
to standard EEG analysis techniques that ignore spatial aspects.
The first stage of this algorithm is to transform EEG signals into
a sequence of topology-preserving multi-spectral and temporal
images. After that, these generated images are fed as inputs
to a convolutional neural network. By overcoming the lack of
data, especially the positive samples, and creating a process to
deal with unbalanced datasets and optimizing the complexity of
the network, our convolutional neural network learns a general
spatially invariant representation of a seizure in a reasonable
time and improves sensitivity, specificity and accuracy result
comparable to the state-of-the-art results.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that is characterized by
abnormal or excessive episodes of neuronal signals inside the
brain. These abnormal brain activities called seizure and can
occur either in partial onset, which comes from a specific brain
region, or general onset, which comes from the brain as a
whole. There are many side effects associated with seizures
such as loss of consciousness and abnormal movements. As
a result, seizure patients require varying medical care that
depends on their situation. In the chronic phase, medications
are taken on a daily basis to prevent further seizures. However,
in the focal seizures, a surgical process can be applied.
Hence, in order to give suitable treatment, we require accurate
detection of seizures. Furthermore, many other uses of seizure
detection exist such as monitoring patients who have surgical
resection or under treatment [1][8]. The standard diagnosis
technique for epilepsy is to monitor brain activities through
electroencephalograms (EEG). However, EEG readings must
be analyzed by highly trained medical professionals who
may need several hours to analyze one day of recording
from a single patient. Therefore, it is beneficial to develop a
technique that can automatically detect seizures from the EEG
recordings. Most work done to date uses expert hand-crafted
features and relies on either spectral or temporal information.
However, it is well known that epileptic seizures are highly
non-stationary phenomena. Recent research has shown that
using deep learning in such an application can improve the
result [1][15][16]. However, many problems are still facing
978-1-5386-6805-4/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 536
DOI 10.1109/ICMLA.2018.00086
Marios Savvides
marioss@andrew.cmu.edu
the use of machine learning algorithms in general and deep
learning approaches in particular to the medical applications.
One of these problems is the lack of data especially the
positive samples, which lead to unbalanced datasets and make
training process harder.
The goal of this research effort is to optimize many existing
designs of automatic seizure detectors that can learn spectral,
temporal and spatial features from multichannel EEG time
series data.
II. R ELATED W ORK
There exist only few publicly available EEG seizure
datasets. In this paper we will consider works using the
biggest freely available dataset (CHB-MIT) and will focus on
the offline seizure detection, which involves analyzing and
labeling patients recordings for the purposes of diagnosis,
monitoring, or treatment planning. The main use of offline
detectors is to replace the need for the laborious visual analysis
or at least make that job easier [1]. Most work done in this
field is either concerned with training detectors for a specific
patient or using cross-patient data. For the patient-specific
detectors, recent research used machine learning algorithms
and the benchmark result was an SVM classifier that achieved
a sensitivity of 0.96 and a low false positive rate of 0.08/hours
[2]. Similar results have been obtained recently using recurrent
convolutional neural network that used image representation
of the raw EEG signals [1]. However, because cross-patient
detectors have more generality and can be used without having
an expert to label patient-specific data; these results tend to
be not that important as the cross-patient detectors. On the
other hand, it is more challenging to design good cross-patient
detectors due to the variability from patient to patient. The
benchmark cross-patient result was achieved using recurrent
convolutional neural network that used image representation
of the raw EEG signals where they achieved an average
sensitivity of 0.85, specificity of 0.83 and a false detection rate
of 0.77/hour on the CHB-MIT dataset [3]. Recently, another
deep neural network approach showed good performance on
only part of the dataset and achieved an average sensitivity of
0.812 and a false detection rate of 0.16/hour [4]. Converting
raw EEG time-series signals into image representation as a
sequence of topology-preserving multi-spectral images and
then using it in a deep neural network was first proposed for
a task focused on mental load classification [5].
Fig. 1. Overview of our approach: (1) multichannel EEG time series are obtained; (2) construct topographical maps for each time frame by applying FFT;
(3) sequence of 3-channel images are fed into a CNN for representation learning and classification.
In (Thodoroff et al., 2016), deep learning showed a promising
performance on seizure detection, however, many challenges
are still exist. In this paper, we are aiming to deal with
two main challenges. For one, overcome the lack of data,
especially the positive samples, and creating a process to
deal with unbalanced datasets. Furthermore, optimizing the
complexity of the network, hence, the time consumption for
training process can be minimized [1].
III. M ETHODOLOGY
In this paper, we will investigate a deep learning approach
for seizure detection from the EEG signal. As shown in Figure
1, the proposed method consists of two main parts. First is con-
verting raw EEG time-series signals into image representation
as a sequence of topology-preserving multispectral images.
After that we construct a convolutional neural network trained
to capture spectral, temporal and spatial patterns to predict
if the image contains a seizure or not. We develop a unique
optimized training technique and apply it to the developed
network.
A. Design Description
Making Images from EEG Time-series Signals: EEG signals
consist of multiple time series that represent the measurements
over different spatial cortex locations. As with many time
series data, most salient features occur in frequency domain
and can be analyzed using the spectrogram of the signal.
In our case, EEG signal has an additional spatial dimension
[5]. In order to represent both spatial and spectral features,
we follow several steps. First, we project the 3D coordinates
of the patients 21 electrodes onto a 2D surface using Polar
Projection, or what is called Azimuthal Equidistant Projection
(AEP), in order to preserve the distance between electrodes in
the 3D plane as shown in Figure 2 [11][12]. Then, we apply a
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Fast Fourier transform over a thirty-second time window and
calculate power values in different frequency bands (1-7, 7-14,
14-49 Hz) for each electrode projection as shown in Figure
3. Finally, to create a continuous image, we interpolate the
values of each electrode projection using cubic interpolation
using Clough-Tocher scheme [5]. This scheme is used to
interpolate the scattered power measurements over the scalp
and to estimate the values between the electrodes over the
16x16 area. This procedure creates images of shape (3x16x16).
Each image has three color channels (one for each frequency
band) with height and width of 16 pixels.
Constructing Convolutional Neural Network: We construct
a convolutional neural network (CNN) to deal with the in-
herent structure of EEG data as shown in Figure 4. The
CNN has been shown to provide good image representation
of the data, therefore, we used it here to work with the image
representation of the spectral, spatial and temporal features
[6]. In this part, we use a CNN that is almost similar to
well-known AlexNet which is used in Imagenet classification
challenge [6]. As shown in Figure 5, network configuration
consists of ten layers (two conv3-32 layers, two conv3-64
layers,two conv3-128 layers, three max pooling layers, one
fully connected layer and a final softmax layer). We adapt the
network used in the benchmark paper and added two more
conv3-128 layers and one max pooling layer in order to handle
the large amount of data that exist in the training set [1]. In
addition, a 0.5 probability dropout was used on the last fully
connected layer to avoid overfiting that may happen due to
the present of the binary classes classification problem. For
the convolutional layers we padded the input with 1 pixel
to preserve the spatial resolution after convolution and the
number of kernels are doubled over each following stack. Also,
we used small receptive fields of size 3x3 and stride of 1 pixel
with ReLU activation function. The Max-pooling layers with
Fig. 2. Making images from EEG time-series signals. This process follows tow paths: 1) Converting 3D electrodes locations into 2D representation. 2)
Applying three different frequency bands over the time series.
Fig. 3. Converting 3D electrodes locations into 2D representation.
a 2x2 window and stride of 2 pixels perform a down-sampling
function [9][10].
IV. DATASET AND DATA PREPROCESSING
In this paper, we are using the biggest freely available
dataset for seizure patients (CHB-MIT) [2]. This dataset
consists of several EEG recordings grouped into 23 cases, were
collected from 22 subjects; 5 males, ages 3-22 and 17 females,
ages 1.5-19. These recordings have a total of more than 951
hours, which is equal to about 3.4 Million seconds. One of
the challenges is that the channel formatting varies from one
patient to another. Therefore, we need to deal with each case
separately to obtain the power values over 21 channels for
each patient. Another challenge related to the dataset is the
labeling process, where we need to do that manually for all
the three and half million seconds.
V. T RAINING
Our goal from the training process is to come up with the
optimum weight values that can minimize the loss generated
by the softmax function. We used Adam algorithm which has
been proved to give a fast convergence rate when used for
training neural networks with a learning factor of 0.001 [13].
In order to overcome the overfitting problem, we used many
approaches that are often used to address this issue. First, we
used a 0.5 probability dropout in the last fully connected layer
of the second configuration [14]. Furthermore, by subsampling
the negative samples of the dataset we can rebalance the ratio
between non-seizure and seizure data thus delaying overfitting
and generating a better validation and testing results.
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Fig. 4. Deep convolutional neural network for image classification problem.
A. Sampling procedure
In this part, we followed two types of sampling procedure.
For one, by randomly subsampling the negative samples of the
dataset we can rebalance the ratio between non-seizure and
seizure data (from 950/3 to 80/20) [1]. This method generate
an acceptable outcomes compared to the benchmark results as
shown in Table 1. Since the sampling is random, we consider
the best result out of ten trials. However, to improve theses
results, we followed a trial and error technique to come up
with an appropriate sampling procedure to replace the random
sampling process. As shown in Table 1, different combinations
of what we call it: Not seizure, Pre-seizure, Pro-seizure and
Pure seizure, can lead to different results. We can defined these
terminologies as follow:
Not seizure: Signals with no seizure. Pre-seizure: Signals
with no seizure but occurs within the five seconds before
seizure happens. Pro-seizure: Signals within the first or the
last five seconds of seizure. Pure seizure: Seizure other than
the first and last five seconds. We kept the original ratio
between negative and positive to stay as it is in the random
sampling (80/20). However, the percents shown in Table 2
representing the ratio of each class separately.
Fig. 5. Convolutional neural network configuration. Ten layers (Convolution + max pooling), followed by a prediction layer (Softmax) for class prediction

Training Dataset Format Sensitivity% Specificity% False Alarm

Non-seizure (80%) Seizure(20%)
Not seizure% Pre-seizure% Pro-seizure% Pure seizure%
Randomly Randomly Randomly Randomly 84.14% 85.5% 0.78
40 40 10 10 85.7% 83.4% 0.8
20 60 5 15 83.9% 81.6% 0.82
60 20 15 5 87.1% 82.3% 0.81
30 50 10 10 84.2% 79.4% 0.84
50 30 10 10 87.95% 86.5% 0.75
20 60 10 10 85.8% 83.6% 0.8
60 20 10 10 86.6% 81.3% 0.82
30 50 15 5 85.3% 80.5% 0.83
50 30 5 15 86.4% 85.8% 0.78
TABLE I
T EST RESULTS OF DIFFERENT COMBINATIONS OF TRAINING DATASET FORMAT.

Method Classifier Sensitivity % False Alarm (/hour)

Proposed Method Convolutional neural network 87.95 % 0.75
Thodoroff et al [1] Recurrent convolutional neural network 85.16% 0.8
Bolagh et al [3] Riemannian Manifold 85.77% 0.77
Wilson et al [7] REVEAL 67% 1.7
TABLE II
T EST RESULTS FOR OUR APPROACH COMPARED TO THE BENCH MARK RESULTS .

Fig. 7. Test results of false alarm for 23 patients compared to the deep neural
Fig. 6. Test results of sensitivity for 23 patients compared to the deep neural network bench mark results (Thodoroff et al).
network bench mark result (Thodoroff et al).

is tested. For the validation results, it took some time before

VI. R ESULTS
To evaluate the performance of our model we compare our
result with the deep neural network and the overall benchmark
results mentioned at the beginning of this paper [1][3][7]. We
applied the training process over 20 epochs to determine where
the best average validation result occurs. In this stage, we used
leave-one-out cross validation, which trains and validates for
N-1 other patients and then tests on all the withheld patient
data and repeats this process N times such that each patient
starting to perform well in both sensitivity and specificity mea-
sures, it shows a noticeably better sensitivity and specificity
after the sixteenth epoch. In general, the results seem valid.
However, for the random sampling it may still be debatable
given that different training subsets could generate different
results. Therefore, we validate our data over a ten trials to
fulfill the concept of random samples which was previously
mentioned in this paper. From Table 1, we see that the result
represent the best random set over the ten trials. On the other

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 Fig. 8. Examples of (A) None seizure and (B) Seizure images. It is not easy to recognize the seizure from multi second and multichannel images
hand, we can notice that different sampling process produced
different results. From Table 1, we can see that (50/30), (10/10)
produced the best result which even exceed the bench mark
results as shown in Table 2. In Figure 6 and Figure 7, a
representation of sensitivity and false alarm over each patient
shows that our approach achieved better generalization over
the patients compared to the neural network benchmark results
[1].
VII. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we used an approach that can learn robust
feature representations from EEG data, that would be tol-
erant to the differences that exist between different seizure
patients and to the noise associated with EEG data. We
overcome the problem of high non-stationarity that exist in
epileptic seizures signal by generating image representation
of these signals over the human scalp. This algorithm has
been successfully proved to be able to preserve the spectral,
spatial and temporal features. Having these image data made
us able to use CNN to do the classification, as opposed to
standard EEG analysis techniques that ignore some spatial
information. The performance of the proposed design showed
that using multi second time window could replace the need of
recurrent neural network and hence reduce the over all design
complexity. We also overcome the problem of unbalanced
datasets by choosing the appropriate sampling technique. The
proposed approach demonstrates significant improvements in
classification accuracy over the state-of-the-art results.
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