Seizure Forecasting with Multiple Time Scales and Features

Forecasting epileptic seizures is a difficult task. Studies of seizure prediction have investigated many different EEG features, but none of them have been useful enough to be applied in clinical practice beyond clinical trials. Moreover, most of these features have been applied to short-term intracranial EEG (iEEG) recordings, limiting the possibility of reliable statistical evaluation. Recent work has shown that seizure forecasting using multiple long time scale cycle analysis (from 40 min to 1 month) and with long-term recordings (>6 months duration) provides the most statistically robust methods.

This paper investigates a large subset of features from the past and present to unravel which features and feature analysis methods will yield the best performance on long-term iEEG recordings (from 14 patients with focal epilepsy) and thus provide the most reliable step toward clinical utility. Specifically, this study implements a multiple long-time scale cycle feature analysis framework for seizure forecasting that considers the state-of-the-art time series features of critical slowing down (autocorrelation and variance) as well as interictal epileptiform discharge (IED) / spike rate, High Frequency Activity (HFA), seven different univariate features, and three Neural Mass Model (NMM) features based on brain dynamics.

Seizure phase histograms of all the features are then analyzed to investigate each feature’s potential for seizure forecasting by evaluating corresponding synchronization indices (SI) on fast (40 minutes to 2 days) and slow (2+ days) wideband time scales. This analysis shows that, for different patients, different subsets of features had SI values exceeding 0.7, indicating their utility for seizure forecasting and suggesting a multi-feature selection approach is required. Out of all combinations considered, the overall performance comparison across patients highlights that ‘autocorrelation + variance + NMM + spike rate’ features achieve the highest average AUC of 0.83, showcasing its performance in forecasting seizures.

In conclusion, a model is proposed that has a similar performance compared to the state-of-the-art method, without the need of selecting the best channel prior to model building. Light is also shed on the comparative performance on long-term recordings of many of the seizure forecasting features considered in the past.