The potential of the Lempel–Ziv complexity of the EEG in diagnosing cognitive impairment in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy

Aim To analyze whether the Lempel–Ziv Complexity (LZC) in quantitative electroencephalogram differs between the temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients with or without cognitive impairment (CI) and explore the diagnostic value of LZC for identifying CI in TLE patients. Methods Twenty‐two clinical features and 20‐min EEG recordings were collected from 48 TLE patients with CI and 27 cognitively normal (CON) TLE patients. Seventy‐six LZC features were calculated for 19 leads in four frequency bands (alpha, beta, delta, and theta). The clinical and LZC features were compared between the two groups. A support vector machine (SVM) was subsequently constructed using the leave‐one‐out method of cross‐validation for LZC features with statistical differences. Results Regarding the clinical features, the level of education (p