One‐dimensional atrous conv‐net based architecture for automatic diagnosis of epilepsy using electroencephalography signals and its brain–computer interface applications

Abstract

AbstractPrecise monitoring and diagnosis of epilepsy by manual analysis of EEG signals are challenging due to the low doctor‐to‐patient ratio, and shortage of medical resources. To automate this diagnosis in real‐time, EEG based Brain–Computer Interface (BCI) system with integration of artificial intelligence techniques will prove to be propitious. This work proposes an end‐to‐end, one‐dimensional atrous conv‐net‐based architecture for automatic epilepsy diagnosis using EEG signals with a conceptual framework of the EEG‐BCI system for routine monitoring and clinical use. The proposed architecture has a robust backbone of six blocks of atrous convolutional layers activated with exponential linear unit functions. The six blocks are followed by the addition of a long short‐term memory layer for automatic feature extraction and sequential EEG data analysis. The efficacy of the proposed architecture has been verified on three publicly available EEG datasets using various evaluation metrics, feature maps, test set evaluation, and ablation studies. An average training and validation accuracy of 96.16% and 90.80% has been achieved upon multiple runs for the three datasets. Ablation experiments indicate that the addition of each block contributed to increasing 17%–25% accuracy scores during the classification of epileptic and non‐epileptic EEG signals. The real‐time EEG‐BCI has been analyzed using weight optimization of the proposed architecture through the NVIDIA Tensor RT framework on a 40 GB DGX A100 NVIDIA workstation. The proposed architecture has generalized well in comparison with the existing techniques for the three EEG datasets and achieved a low training and validation loss with optimum evaluation metrics. This makes the proposed architecture suitable for future EEG‐BCI system deployment in the automatic diagnosis of epilepsy.