Detection of EEG signals in normal and epileptic seizures with multiscale multifractal analysis approach via weighted horizontal visibility graph

Abstract

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals contain important information about the regulation of brain system. Thus, automatic detection of epilepsy by analyzing the characteristics obtained from EEG signals has important research implications in the field of clinical medicine. In this paper, the horizontal visibility graph (HVG) algorithm is used to map multifractal EEG signals into complex networks. Then, we study the structure of the networks and explore the nonlinear dynamics properties of the EEG signals inherited from these networks. In order to better describe complex brain behaviors, we use the angle between two connected nodes as the edge weight of the network and construct the weighted horizontal visibility graph (WHVG). In our studies, fractality and multifractality of WHVG are innovatively used to analyze the structure of related networks. However, these methods only analyze the reconstructed dynamical system in general characterizations, they are not sufficient to describe the complex behavior and cannot provide a comprehensive picture of the system. To this effect, we propose an improved multiscale multifractal analysis (MMA) for network, which extends the description of the network dynamics features by focusing on the relationship between the multifractality and the measured scale-free intervals. Furthermore, neural networks are applied to train the above-mentioned parameters for the classification and identification of three kinds of EEG signals, i.e., health, interictal phase, and ictal phase. By evaluating our experimental results, the classification accuracy is 99.0%, reflecting the effectiveness of the WHVG algorithm in extracting the potential dynamic characteristics of EEG signals.