Global Epileptic Seizure Identification With Affinity Propagation Clustering Partition Mutual Information Using Cross-Layer Fully Connected Neural Network

A longstanding challenge in epilepsy research and practice is the need to classify synchronization patterns hidden in multivariate electroencephalography (EEG) data that is routinely superimposed with intensive noise. It is essential to select a suitable feature extraction method to achieve high recognition performance. A typical approach is to extract the mutual information (MI) between pairs of channels. This calculation, which considers the differences between the sequence pairs to build a reasonable partition, can improve the classification performance. On this basis, however, it is even more difficult to adaptively classify the synchronization patterns hidden in multivariate EEG data under circumstances of insufficient a priori knowledge of domain dependency, such as denoising, feature extraction on a special patient, etc. To address these problems by (1) effectively calculating the MI matrix (synchronization pattern) and (2) accurately classifying the seizure or non-seizure state, this study first accurately measures the synchronization between channel pairs in terms of affinity propagation clustering partition MI (APCPMI). The global synchronization measurement is then obtained by organizing APCPMIs of all channel pairs into a correlation matrix. Finally, a cross-layer fully connected net is designed to characterize the synchronization dynamics correlation matrices adaptively and identify seizure or non-seizure states automatically. Experiments are performed using the CHB-MIT scalp EEG dataset to evaluate the proposed approach. Seizure states are identified with an accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 0.9793 ± 0.002, 0.9942 ± 0.0005, and 0.9676 ± 0.003, respectively; the resulting performance is superior to those achieved by most existing methods over the same dataset. Furthermore, the approach alleviates the necessity for strictly preprocessing (denoising, removing interferences and artifacts) the EEG data using prior knowledge, which is usually required by existing approaches.