An Evolving-Dynamic Network Activity Approach to Epileptic Seizure Prediction using Machine Learning

Absence epilepsy is a neurological condition characterized by abnormally synchronous electrical activity within two mutually connected brain regions, the thalamus and cortex, that results in seizures and affects more than 6.5 million people. Epilepsy is commonly studied through the use of the electroencephalogram (EEG), a device that monitors brain waves over time. In this study, we introduced machine learning models to predict epileptic seizures in two ways, one to train logistic regression models to provide an accurate decision boundary to predict based off frequency features, and second to train convolutional neural networks to predict based off spectral power images from EEG. This pipeline employed a two model approach, using logistic regression and convolutional neural networks to predict seizures. The evaluation, performed on data from 9 mice, achieved prediction accuracies of 98%. The proposed methodology introduces a novel aspect of looking at predicting absence seizures, which are known to be short events, in addition to the comparison between a time-dependent and time-agnostic seizure prediction classifier. The overall goal of these experiments were to build a model that can accurately predict whether or not a seizure will occur.