EEG analysis of seizure patterns using visibility graphs for detection of generalized seizures

Background The traditional EEG features in the time and frequency domain show limited seizure detection performance in the epileptic population with intellectual disability (ID). In addition, the influence of EEG seizure patterns on detection performance was less studied. New method A single-channel EEG signal can be mapped into visibility graphs (VGS), including basic visibility graph (VG), horizontal VG (HVG), and difference VG (DVG). These graphs were used to characterize different EEG seizure patterns. To demonstrate its effectiveness in identifying EEG seizure patterns and detecting generalized seizures, EEG recordings of 615 h on one EEG channel from 29 epileptic patients with ID were analyzed. Results A novel feature set with discriminative power for seizure detection was obtained by using the VGS method. The degree distributions (DDs) of DVG can clearly distinguish EEG of each seizure pattern. The degree entropy and power-law degree power in DVG were proposed here for the first time, and they show significant difference between seizure and non-seizure EEG. The connecting structure measured by HVG can better distinguish seizure EEG from background than those by VG and DVG. Comparison with existing method A traditional EEG feature set based on frequency analysis was used here as a benchmark feature set. With a support vector machine (SVM) classifier, the seizure detection performance of the benchmark feature set (sensitivity of 24%, FD_t/h of 1.8s) can be improved by combining our proposed VGS features extracted from one EEG channel (sensitivity of 38%, FD_t/h of 1.4s). Conclusions The proposed VGS-based features can help improve seizure detection for ID patients.