Co-ReaSON: EEG-based Onset Detection of Focal Epileptic Seizures with Multimodal Feature Representations

Early detection of an epileptic seizure’s onset is crucial to reduce the impact of seizures on the patient’s health. The Electroencephalogram (EEG) has been widely used in clinical epileptology for continuous, long-term measurement of electrical activity in the brain. Despite numerous EEG-based approaches employing diverse models and feature extraction methods for seizure detection, these methods rarely tackle the more challenging task of early detection of the seizure onset, especially as only a few EEG channels are impacted at the onset, and the seizure evidence is minimal. Furthermore, EEG-based seizure onset detection remains challenging due to the sparse, imbalanced, and noisy data, as well as the complexity posed by the diverse nature of epileptic seizures in patients. In this paper, we propose Co-ReaSON – a novel approach towards early detection of focal seizure onsets by considering the onset-specific increase in spatio-temporal correlations across the EEG channels observed over a range of multimodal EEG feature representations, combined in a ResNet18-based model architecture. Evaluation on a real-world dataset demonstrates that Co-ReaSON outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in focal seizure onset detection by at least 5 percent points regarding the macro-average F1-score.