Modified Time-Frequency Marginal Features for Detection of Seizures in Newborns

The timely detection of seizure activity in the case of newborns can help save lives. Clinical signs of seizures in newborns are difficult to observe, so, in this study, we propose an automated method of detecting seizures in newborns using multi-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) recording acquired from 36 newborns admitted to Royal Women’s Hospital, Brisbane, Australia. A novel set of time-frequency marginal features are defined to detect seizure activity in newborns. The proposed set is based on the observation that EEG seizure signals appear either as a train of spikes or as a summation of frequency-modulated chirps with slow variation in the instantaneous frequency curve. The proposed set of features is obtained by extracting the time-frequency (TF) signature of seizure spikes and frequency-modulated chirps by exploiting the direction of ridges in the TF plane. Based on extracted TF signature of spikes, the modified time-marginal is computed whereas based on the extracted TF signature of frequency-modulated chirps, the modified frequency-marginal is computed. It is demonstrated that features extracted from the modified time-domain marginal and frequency-domain marginal in combination with TF statistical and frequency-related features lead to better accuracy than the existing TF signal classification method, i.e., the proposed method achieves an F1 score of 70.93% which is 5% greater than the existing method.