Epilepsy Prediction and Detection Using Attention-CssCDBN with Dual-Task Learning

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Epilepsy is a group of neurological disorders characterized by epileptic seizures, and it affects tens of millions of people worldwide. Currently, the most effective diagnostic method employs the monitoring of brain activity through electroencephalogram (EEG). However, it is critical to predict epileptic seizures in patients prior to their onset, allowing for the administration of preventive medications before the seizure occurs. As a pivotal application of artificial intelligence in medical treatment, learning the features of EEGs for epilepsy prediction and detection remains a challenging problem, primarily due to the presence of intra-class and inter-class variations in EEG signals. In this study, we propose the spatio-temporal EEGNet, which integrates contractive slab and spike convolutional deep belief network (CssCDBN) with a self-attention architecture, augmented by dual-task learning to address this issue. Initially, our model was designed to extract high-order and deep representations from EEG spectrum images, enabling the simultaneous capture of spatial and temporal information. Furthermore, EEG-based verification aids in reducing intra-class variation by considering the time correlation of the EEG during the fine-tuning stage, resulting in easier inference and training. The results demonstrate the notable efficacy of our proposed method. Our method achieved a sensitivity of 98.5%, a false-positive rate (FPR) of 0.041, a prediction time of 50.92 min during the epilepsy prediction task, and an accuracy of 94.1% during the epilepsy detection task, demonstrating significant improvements over current state-of-the-art methods.