A Self-Learning Methodology for Epileptic Seizure Detection with Minimally-Supervised Edge Labeling

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders and affects over 65 million people worldwide. Despite the continuing advances in anti-epileptic treatments, one third of the epilepsy patients live with drug resistant seizures. Besides, the mortality rate among epileptic patients is 2 – 3 times higher than in the matching group of the general population. Wearable devices offer a promising solution for the detection of seizures in real time so as to alert family and caregivers to provide immediate assistance to the patient. However, in order for the detection system to be reliable, a considerable amount of labeled data is required to train it. Labeling epilepsy data is a costly and time-consuming process that requires manual inspection and annotation of electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings by medical experts. In this paper, we present a self-learning methodology for epileptic seizure detection without medical supervision. We propose a minimally-supervised algorithm for automatic labeling of seizures in order to generate personalized training data. We demonstrate that the median deviation of the labels from the ground truth is only 10.1 seconds or, equivalently, less than 1% of the signal length. Moreover, we show that training a real-time detection algorithm with data labeled by our algorithm produces a degradation of less than 2.5% in comparison to training it with data labeled by medical experts. We evaluated our methodology on a wearable platform and achieved a lifetime of 2.59 days on a single battery charge.