Epileptic Seizure Forecasting: Probabilistic seizure-risk assessment and data-fusion

Epileptic seizure forecasting, combined with the delivery of preventative therapies, holds the potential to greatly improve the quality of life for epilepsy patients and their caregivers. Forecasting seizures could prevent some potentially catastrophic consequences such as injury and death in addition to a long list of potential clinical benefits it may provide for patient care in hospitals. The challenge of seizure forecasting lies within the seemingly unpredictable transitions of brain dynamics into the ictal state. The main body of computational research on determining seizure risk has been focused solely on prediction algorithms, which involves a remarkable issue of balancing accuracy and false-alarms. In this paper, we developed a seizure-risk warning system that employs Bayesian convolutional neural network (BCNN) to provide meaningful information to the patient and provide a greater opportunity for him/her to be potentially more in charge of his/her health. We use scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) signals and release information on the certainty of our automatic seizure-risk assessment. In the process, we pave the ground-work towards incorporating auxiliary signals to improve our EEG-based seizure-risk assessment system. Our previous CNN results show an average AUC of 74.65% while we could achieve on an EEG-only BCNN an average AUC of 68.70%. This drop in performance is the cost of providing richer information to the patient at this stage of this research.