Improving phase congruency for EEG data reduction

Real signals are often corrupted by noise. In applications where the noise power spectrum is variable with time, dynamic noise estimation and compensation can potentially improve the performance of signal processing algorithms. One such application is scalp EEG monitoring in epilepsy, where the electrical activity generated by cranio-facial muscle contraction and expansion, often obscures the measured brainwave signals. This work presents a data reduction algorithm which is based on differentiating interictal from normal background activity, in epileptic scalp EEG signals, using a modified phase congruency technique. The modification is based on dynamically estimating muscle activity from the signal and incorporating this estimation in phase congruency computations. The proposed algorithm identifies 90%of interictal spikes whilst transmitting only 45% of EEG data. This is in the order of 15% improvement in data reduction when compared to the performance obtained with the state-of-the-art denoised phase congruency-which calculates a constant noise threshold-applied to the same dataset.