A Modified Transformer Network for Seizure Detection Using EEG Signals

Abstract

Seizures have a serious impact on the physical function and daily life of epileptic patients. The automated detection of seizures can assist clinicians in taking preventive measures for patients during the diagnosis process. The combination of deep learning (DL) model with convolutional neural network (CNN) and transformer network can effectively extract both local and global features, resulting in improved seizure detection performance. In this study, an enhanced transformer network named Inresformer is proposed for seizure detection, which is combined with Inception and Residual network extracting different scale features of electroencephalography (EEG) signals to enrich the feature representation. In addition, the improved transformer network replaces the existing Feedforward layers with two half-step Feedforward layers to enhance the nonlinear representation of the model. The proposed architecture utilizes discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to decompose the original EEG signals, and the three sub-bands are selected for signal reconstruction. Then, the Co-MixUp method is adopted to solve the problem of data imbalance, and the processed signals are sent to the Inresformer network for seizure information capture and recognition. Finally, discriminant fusion is performed on the results of three-scale EEG sub-signals to achieve final seizure recognition. The proposed network achieves the best accuracy of 100% on Bonn dataset and the average accuracy of 98.03%, sensitivity of 95.65%, and specificity of 98.57% on the long-term CHB-MIT dataset. Compared to the existing DL networks, the proposed method holds significant potential for clinical research and diagnosis applications with competitive performance.