A neuromorphic spiking neural network detects epileptic high frequency oscillations in the scalp EEG

Interictal High Frequency Oscillations (HFO) are measurable in scalp EEG. This development has aroused interest in investigating their potential as biomarkers of epileptogenesis, seizure propensity, disease severity, and treatment response. The demand for therapy monitoring in epilepsy has kindled interest in compact wearable electronic devices for long-term EEG recording. Spiking neural networks (SNN) have emerged as optimal architectures for embedding in compact low-power signal processing hardware. We analyzed 20 scalp EEG recordings from 11 pediatric focal lesional epilepsy patients. We designed a custom SNN to detect events of interest (EoI) in the 80–250 Hz ripple band and reject artifacts in the 500–900 Hz band. We identified the optimal SNN parameters to detect EoI and reject artifacts automatically. The occurrence of HFO thus detected was associated with active epilepsy with 80% accuracy. The HFO rate mirrored the decrease in seizure frequency in 8 patients (p = 0.0047). Overall, the HFO rate correlated with seizure frequency (rho = 0.90 CI [0.75 0.96], p < 0.0001, Spearman’s correlation). The fully automated SNN detected clinically relevant HFO in the scalp EEG. This study is a further step towards non-invasive epilepsy monitoring with a low-power wearable device.