An Epilepsy Diagnosis Method Based on a Transferred Alexnet Model and Eeg Signals

Abstract

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder, and its sudden seizures pose a serious threat to the quality of life of patients. Not only does this condition cause patients to potentially lose control and consciousness during seizures, leading to possible injuries or dangerous situations, but it also has a significant impact on their mental health, triggering issues such as anxiety and depression. An intelligent epilepsy diagnosis process based on electroencephalogram (EEG) signals offers notable advantages. First, it provides noninvasive brainwave signals that accurately monitor and record the patterns and characteristics of epileptic seizures, offering objective diagnostic criteria for doctors. Second, with the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, large amounts of EEG data can be efficiently analyzed, improving the speed and accuracy of diagnosis and providing timely and effective treatment plans for patients. Additionally, intelligent diagnostic systems can achieve real-time monitoring, promptly alert people to potential epileptic seizures, and provide a safer living environment for patients. In this context, this paper proposes an epilepsy diagnosis method based on a transferred AlexNet model and EEG signals. The main contributions of this paper are as follows. (1) A transfer learning mechanism is incorporated into the AlexNet model through the direct transfer of its neural network structure and the modification of some existing neural network structures, followed by collaborative training with the addition of a domain adaptation layer in the network. This introduced transfer mechanism can address small sample size issues. (2) The traditional AlexNet model suffers from redundant feature extraction, leading to slow training. This paper adds batch normalization (BN) layers after each convolutional layer in the AlexNet model to normalize the features extracted from the convolutional layers. This emphasizes the representation of the important features of EEG signals and enables the lower layers of the network to learn the features needed for EEG signal processing. (3) The transferred AlexNet model proposed in this paper is applied to extract the features of epilepsy EEG signals, and the extracted features are input into a support vector machine (SVM) classifier to obtain epilepsy diagnosis results. Comparative experiments show that the diagnostic method used in this paper yields superior results and shorter training times than those of the competing approaches.