Cross-database evaluation of EEG based epileptic seizures detection driven by adaptive median feature baseline correction

•We present cross-database evaluation for classification of epileptic seizures using 5 EEG databases.•We studied the effect of adaptive median feature baseline correction (AM-FBC), smoothing of train and test data and post-processing of classifier output.•AM-FBC plays a significant role to overcome inter-database variation of feature distribution. In long-term electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, automated classification of epileptic seizures is desirable in diagnosing epilepsy patients, as it otherwise depends on visual inspection. To the best of the author’s knowledge, existing studies have validated their algorithms using cross-validation on the same database and less number of attempts have been made to extend their work on other databases to test the generalization capability of the developed algorithms. In this study, we present the algorithm for cross-database evaluation for classification of epileptic seizures using five EEG databases collected from different centers. The cross-database framework helps when sufficient epileptic seizures EEG data are not available to build automated seizure detection model. Two features, namely successive decomposition index and matrix determinant were extracted at a segmentation length of 4 s (50% overlap). Then, adaptive median feature baseline correction (AM-FBC) was applied to overcome the inter-patient and inter-database variation in the feature distribution. The classification was performed using a support vector machine classifier with leave-one-database-out cross-validation. Different classification scenarios were considered using AM-FBC, smoothing of the train and test data, and post-processing of the classifier output. Simulation results revealed the highest area under the curve-sensitivity-specificity-false detections (per hour) of 1–1–1–0.15, 0.89–0.99–0.82–2.5, 0.99–0.73–1–1, 0.95–0.97–0.85–1.7, 0.99–0.99–0.92–1.1 using the Ramaiah Medical College and Hospitals, Children’s Hospital Boston-Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Temple University Hospital, Maastricht University Medical Centre, and University of Bonn databases respectively. We observe that the AM-FBC plays a significant role in improving seizure detection results by overcoming inter-database variation of feature distribution. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study reporting on the cross-database evaluation of classification of epileptic seizures and proven to be better generalization capability when evaluated using f