Childhood epilepsy syndromes classification based on fused features of electroencephalogram and electrocardiogram

Abstract

The paper presents a novel algorithm to classify children's epileptic syndromes based on the fused features of electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG). The purpose is to assess whether multimodal physiological signals could improve the classification performance of epileptic syndromes over a single physiological signal. The study is carried out on the epileptic syndromes database recorded by the Children's Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine (CHZU), that includes the synchronised EEGs and ECGs of 16 children suffered from the infantile spasms (known as the WEST syndrome, named) and the childhood absence epilepsy (CAE), respectively. Experiments are conducted and compared using the EEGs and ECGs in the ictal and interictal periods. The data imbalanced issue between the ictal and interictal periods is also considered by applying a synthetic minority sample generating approach. The experimental results show that using the fused feature of EEG + ECG can achieve an average of 98.15% overall classification accuracy, which is better than using the single physiological signal.