Absence epilepsy seizure onsets detection based on ECG signal analysis

Detecting epileptic seizure onsets is the main goal of numerous studies, since it has many profits for patients and clinicians. Methods based on electroencephalogram (EEG), electrocardiogram (ECG), and other electrophysiological signals had been used for automatic detection in the literature. For the first time, absence seizures have been detected based on ECG signals in this study. Animal models of absence epilepsy, WAGRij rats, with repetitive seizures (duration about few seconds´), have been investigated. After detecting QRS complexes from ECG signal and extracting 38 different linear, nonlinear and frequency domain features from heart rate variability, feature vectors were constructed. In order to obtain high efficiency detection algorithm, feature selection have been implemented based on wrapper approach. Results related to support vector machine (SVM), linear discriminate analysis (LDA), and k-nearest neighbor (kNN), three important classifiers for seizure detection have been compared in this work. The test results for patient- independent detection with 5 selected features in leave-one-out (LOO) train approach had accuracy of 74%, 72% and 71% for SVM, LDA and kNN, respectively. All the algorithms and methods have been optimized to be useful in embedded implementations.