RNN and BiLSTM Fusion for Accurate Automatic Epileptic Seizure Diagnosis Using EEG Signals

Epilepsy is a common neurological condition. The effects of epilepsy are not restricted to seizures alone. They comprise a wide spectrum of problems that might impair and reduce quality of life. Even with medication, 30% of epilepsy patients still have recurring seizures. An epileptic seizure is caused by significant neuronal electrical activity, which affects brain activity. EEG shows these changes as high-amplitude spiky and sluggish waves. Recognizing seizures on an electroencephalogram (EEG) manually by a professional neurologist is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, hence an efficient automated approach is necessary for the identification of epileptic seizure. One technique to increase the speed and accuracy with which a diagnosis of epileptic seizures could be made is by utilizing computer-aided diagnosis systems that are built on deep neural networks, or DNN. This study introduces a fusion of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and bi-directional long short-term memories (BiLSTMs) for automatic epileptic seizure identification via EEG signal processing in order to tackle the aforementioned informational challenges. An electroencephalogram’s (EEG) raw data were first normalized after undergoing pre-processing. A RNN model was fed the normalized EEG sequence data and trained to accurately extract features from the data. Afterwards, the features were passed to the BiLSTM layers for processing so that further temporal information could be retrieved. In addition, the proposed RNN-BiLSTM model was tested in an experimental setting using the freely accessible UCI epileptic seizure dataset. Experimental findings of the suggested model have achieved avg values of 98.90%, 98.50%, 98. 20%, and 98.60%, respectively, for accuracy, sensitivity, precision, and specificity. To further verify the new model’s efficacy, it is compared to other models, such as the RNN-LSTM and the RNN-GRU learning models, and is shown to have improved the same metrics by 1.8%, 1.69%, 1.95%, and 2.2% on using 5-fold. Additionally, the proposed method was compared to state-of-the-art approaches and proved to be a more accurate categorization of such techniques.