Administrative Behavior

Abstract

This article presents an automated, patient-specific method for the detection of epileptic seizure onset from noninvasive electroencephalography.We adopt a patient-specific approach to exploit the consistency of an individual patientÕs seizure and nonseizure electroencephalograms.Our method uses a wavelet decomposition to construct a feature vector that captures the morphology and spatial distribution of an electroencephalographic epoch, and then determines whether that vector is representative of a patientÕs seizure or nonseizure electroencephalogram using the support vector machine classification algorithm.Our completely automated method was tested on noninvasive electroencephalograms from 36 pediatric subjects suffering from a variety of seizure types.It detected 131 of 139 seizure events within 8.0 Æ 3.2 seconds of electrographic onset, and declared 15 false detections in 60 hours of clinical electroencephalography.Our patient-specific method can be used to initiate delay-sensitive clinical procedures following seizure onset, for example, the injection of a functional imaging radiotracer.