Approximate Zero-Crossing: A new interpretable, highly discriminative and low-complexity feature for EEG and iEEG seizure detection

Objective: Long-term monitoring of people with epilepsy based on electroencephalography (EEG) and intracranial EEG (iEEG) has the potential to deliver key clinical information for personalised epilepsy treatment. More specifically, in outpatient settings, the available solutions are not satisfactory either due to poor classification performance or high complexity to be executed in resource-constrained devices (e.g., wearable systems). Therefore, we hypothesize that obtaining high discriminative features is the main avenue to improve low-complex seizure-detection algorithms. Approach: inspired by how neurologists recognize ictal EEG data, and to tackle this problem by targeting resource-constrained wearable devices, we introduce a new interpretable and highly discriminative feature for EEG and iEEG, namely approximate zero-crossing (AZC). We obtain AZC by applying a polygonal approximation to mimic how our brain selects prominent patterns among noisy data and then using a zero-crossing count as a measure of the dominating frequency. By employing Kullback-Leiber divergence, leveraging CHB-MIT and SWEC-ETHZ iEEG datasets, we compare the AZC discriminative power against a set of 56 classical literature features (CLF). Moreover, we assess the performances of a low-complex seizure detection method using only AZC features versus employing the CLF set. Main results: three AZC features obtained with different approximation thresholds are among the five with the highest median discriminative power. Moreover, seizure classification based on only AZC features outperforms an equivalent CLF-based method. The former detects 102 and 194 seizures against 99 and 161 for the latter (CHB-MIT and SWEC-ETHZ, respectively). Moreover, the AZC-based method keeps a similar false-alarm rate (i.e., an average of 2.1 and 1.0, against 2.0 and 0.5, per day). Significance: we propose a new feature and demonstrate its capability in seizure classification for scalp and intracranial EEG. We envision the use of such a feature to improve outpatient monitoring with resource-constrained devices.