Unsupervised Feature Representation Based on Deep Boltzmann Machine for Seizure Detection

The Electroencephalogram (EEG) pattern of seizure activities is highly individual-dependent and requires experienced specialists to annotate seizure events. It is clinically time-consuming and error-prone to identify seizure activities by visually scanning EEG signals. Since EEG data are heavily under-represented, supervised learning techniques are not always practical, particularly when the data is not sufficiently labelled. Visualization of EEG data in low-dimensional feature space can ease the annotation to support subsequent supervised learning for seizure detection. Here, we leverage the benefit of both the time-frequency domain features and the Deep Boltzmann Machine (DBM) based unsupervised learning techniques to represent EEG signals in a 2-dimensional (2D) feature space. A novel unsupervised learning approach based on DBM, namely DBM_transient, is proposed by training DBM to a transient state for representing EEG signals in a 2D feature space and clustering seizure and non-seizure events visually. The effectiveness of DBM_transient is demonstrated on a widely-used benchmark dataset from Bonn University (Bonn dataset) and a raw clinical dataset from Chinese 301 Hospital (C301 dataset), with a large fisher discriminant value, surpassing the abilities of other dimensionality reduction methods, including DBM converged to an equilibrium state, Kernel Principal Component Analysis, Isometric Feature Mapping, t-distributed Stochastic Neighbour Embedding, Uniform Manifold Approximation. Such feature representation and visualization can help physicians to understand better the normal versus epileptic brain activities of each patient and thus enhance their diagnosis and treatment abilities. The significance of our approach facilitates its future usage in clinical applications.