Detection of Epileptic Seizures in Stereo-EEG using

Frequency-Weighted Energy
Rajeev Yadav, Rajeev Agarwal and M. N. S. Swamy, Fellow, IEEE
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University
1455, de Maisonneuve Blvd. West, Montreal, Quebec, H3G 1M8, CANADA
Email: r_yadav@ece.concordia.ca, ragarwal@stellate.com, swamy@ece.concordia.ca

AbstractThis paper proposes a new algorithm for seizure

detection based on the evolution-like characteristics of a seizure.
Most of the existing algorithms for automatic detection of the
epileptic seizures in electroencephalograms (EEG) rely upon
some pre-defined/patient-tunable detection threshold to classify
the data as normal or abnormal. In this paper, we present a
method for seizure detection in stereoencephalograms (SEEG)
using frequency-weighted energy. The method does not require
a threshold or any a priori information about the seizure for
its detection. The method is gradient-based and any activity
that exceeds the minimum duration satisfying our criteria is
considered as a potential seizure activity. The performance of
the algorithm is evaluated on 100 hours of single channel SEEG
data obtained from five different patients. An overall sensitivity
of 96.6% and a false detection rate of 0.21/h is obtained on the
complete data.

I. I NTRODUCTION
Epileptic seizure is an abnormal electro-physiological phenomenon of the brain resulting in an abnormal synchronization
of electrical neuronal activity that can be observed as rhythmic
electroencephalogram (EEG) discharges. It can manifest as
an alteration in the mental state, tonic or clonic movements,
convulsions, and various other psychic symptoms. To monitor
and detect such abnormal brain activity, long-term EEG is
performed. This abnormal neuronal activity can last from
several seconds to a few minutes. Long-term monitoring of
a patient generates a large amount of data, which is very
time consuming for the electroencephalographer (EEGer) to
review. Even with a rapid review of the digital EEG, the
task of continuous visual analysis of this data is challenging.
Therefore, it is necessary to develop methods for automatic
detection of these patterns in the digital EEG. A fast robust
algorithm, with a very high sensitivity and a low false detection
rate, can be used for the real-time seizure detection and as an
early warning system.
The complexity associated with the detection of such abnormal EEG activity is due to the high variability in the seizure
morphologies. The time of occurrence of seizures is unknown
and the seizure presents itself with a sudden increase in the
amplitude and a sudden change in the frequency in the EEG.
This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research
Council (NSERC) of Canada and Regroupement Stratgique en Microlectronique du Qubec (ReSMiQ)

1-4244-1176-9/07/$25.00 2007 IEEE.

77

A new type of rhythm appears, hesitantly, and then more

distinctly, and soon it boldly dominates the tracing. It tends to
become slower with increasing amplitude and the more distinct
spiky phases of the rhythmical waves [1]. In the literature,
there has been an enormous effort towards enhancing the
seizure detection sensitivity and reducing the false detections.
Seizure detection performance depends on the features that
discriminate the seizure EEG from the background EEG.
Energy has been used as one of the features in many algorithms [2-4]. Teagers operator or nonlinear energy operator
(NLEO) is known to be sensitive to both the amplitude and
the frequency variations. The study in [3] has shown the
superiority of the NLEO over the conventional energy for
seizure detection. The energy measure derived by Teagers
algorithm attributes to seizure activity a higher energy than
that for non-seizure activity, with a sensitivity of 53% and
zero false detection. In [5], a more generalized form of the
Teagers operator is presented for adaptive segmentation. In
this paper, we present a method of seizure detection using a
generalized form of Teager operator. This method does not
require any threshold or a priori information about the seizure
to be detected. The method is duration based and any activity
that exceeds the minimum duration and satisfies our criteria
is considered as a potential seizure activity.
In Section II, we describe the complete methodology of the
proposed seizure detection algorithm with the description of
each stage, i.e. the pre-processing, the feature extraction and
the classification stages. In Section III, the results obtained
from the proposed algorithm for all the five patients are
presented. Conclusion is provided in Section IV.
II. M ETHOD
There is a high variability in the epileptic EEG patterns
within a patient, and that between patients. The performance of
a seizure detection algorithm depends on the extracted features
and on the classifier discriminating the seizure EEG from the
background EEG. It has been observed that the amplitude of
a seizure grows slowly, with one or two dominant rhythms,
for a few seconds before it changes. This slow evolution can
last from several seconds to a few minutes. Sometimes it
is observed that the amplitude evolves slowly with a mixed
frequency and lasts for a longer duration; in some cases,

Frequency Weighted
Preprocessing Block

Stage I

Classification

High amplitude artifact

Energy

Stage II

Stage III

Fig. 1. Block diagram of the automatic seizure detection using the frequencyweighted energy

the seizures have a higher frequency as compared to the

background, and may last for a short or medium duration and
may or may not have a sustained dominant rhythm. Some
seizures which are difficult to detect present themselves with
mixed frequencies with minimal amplitude change from the
background EEG. Overall, at a given instance, the amplitude
or the frequency or both change during a seizure evolution
and this could facilitate the seizure detection. We define the
seizure activity as a paroxysmal burst of neuronal discharge
that is clearly different from the background EEG and lasts at
least six seconds.
The frequency-weighted energy obtained using the NLEO
is used to capture evolving patterns in the amplitude and
the frequency during the epileptic seizures. The proposed
algorithm is divided into three stages. In stage I, the preprocessing of raw intracerebral or depth/stereoencephalograms
(SEEG) is carried out. Since the seizure activity is between
3-30 Hz, the EEG signal is band-pass filtered. Artifacts such
as the power line noise, electrode pop-up/disconnection, and
very high amplitude motion artifacts are removed. In stage II,
a 2-second sliding window is used in steps of 0.25 seconds to
compute the mean frequency weighted energy (FWE). At any
given time, if an electrode disconnection or a high amplitude
artifact is observed in an epoch, there are no further detections
for next 30 seconds and this reduces the false positives. In
stage III, final classification into normal or abnormal activity
of EEG is performed after smoothing the FWE by a moving
average filter. The block diagram for the proposed algorithm
is as shown in Fig. 1. Each stage of the block diagram is
described in detail in the following sub-sections.
A. Data Selection
Single channel intracerebral recordings (SEEG) of five
patients totaling 100 hours, sampled at 200 Hz stored on CDs
are used for the present study. Each patient had five recordings,
including three recordings with seizures, one without seizure
when the patient was awake, and one without seizures when
the patient was asleep. Each recording was about 4 hours long
(sometimes 5 hours long). In all, each patient had about 20
hours SEEG data containing at least three seizures. In order
to evaluate any detection method, one important factor is the
selection of the data. The data should in no way be pre-selected
to address a specific case. Hence, during the development
phase a section of one the patients SEEG data containing
at least one seizure and some background EEG was selected
randomly. The algorithm was developed on this single EEG
data. The performance was evaluated using the remaining data
set of the SEEG data from five patients. It is very important to

78

Amplitude (mV)

EEG

Electrode popup/disconnection artifact

2
0

Time (sec.)

80 s

Fig. 2. An example of SEEG section consisting on a high amplitude artifact

and an electrode pop-up/disconnection artifact.

know the exact onset of the seizures and this was provided by
EEG experts at Stellate Systems, Montreal. This information
is used to assess the overall detection performance of the
algorithm.
B. Stage I
In stage I, the raw EEG is first band-pass filtered using a
5th order Butterworth IIR digital filter whose pass band is
chosen to be the dominant seizure frequency band namely, 330 Hz, which is referred to as the full spectrum. Depth EEG
is relatively free from artifacts as compared to the scalp EEG,
but comprises a wide morphology of seizures. The amplitude
in the depth recordings is relatively higher than that of the
scalp EEG. Any high amplitude activity (above 2500V )
that is observed is generally due to motion artifact and hence,
is removed in the pre-processing stage. Power line artifacts (60
Hz) picked up due to poor electrode contact, frequent during
long-term monitoring, are removed with the band-pass filter.
This yields enriched noise free seizure information for feature
extraction in stage II. Detection is suspended for the next
30 seconds whenever an electrode pop-up or disconnection is
observed. Figure 2 represents an example of a section of the
EEG consisting of high amplitude and electrode disconnection
artifacts. It is very important to address these two artifacts
due to the nature of the detection algorithm. Removal of these
artifacts prior to the computation of the features ensures a
reduction in the false positive rate.
C. Stage II
In general, during an epileptic seizure the EEG patterns
are distinguished from the background EEG by a change in
the amplitude with one dominant rhythm for a short duration.
Teager proposed a simple method to detect d the measure of
energy proportional to the change in both the amplitude and
the frequency, which can be presented in its discrete form as
d [x(n)] = x2 (n) x(n 1)x(n 2)

(1)

By using simulated signals, Kaiser analyzed this operator

and found that it can detect the frequency and the amplitude

10e4
1

9e4

FWE
Smooth FWE

Seizure

8
6
6
4
4

Time (min.)

240

Fig. 3. An example of a 4-hour FWE of one of the patients and the smoothed
FWE. During seizure activity, the FWE grows rapidly, and is used as the
detection criteria in the proposed algorithm. The true seizures (seizures 1, 2,
and 3) are shown in thick boxes.

58

75

Time (min.)

Fig. 4. The 17-minute boxed portion section of the FWE corresponding to

seizure 2 in Fig. 3 is magnified. FWE algorithm attributes a higher energy
during seizure than during the non-seizure activity.

of these signals. One of the key properties for a pure tone can
be summarized by the rule
Qd (n) = d [Acos(0 n + ] = A2 sin2 0

Qp1

(2)

For 0 much less than the sampling frequency, Qd (n)

A 02 . In the case where the frequencies of interest are much
lower than the sampling frequency, as with EEGs, the output
of the NLEO can be considered as an indication of the spectral
content of the signal. A more generalized form of the Teager
operator given by [5] can be represented as

k = Qp Qp1

p2

Qp3
Qp6

Qp5

Qp4

Qd (n)

= x(n 1)x(n 2) x(n)x(n 4)

(3)

The expected value of the output of (3) may be taken as a

measure of the desired FWE. For the epoch with a step size
of 0.25 seconds, the expected value of the FWE is computed
using (3). A moving average filter can be used to reduce the
effect of noise in the FWEs. A 120-point moving average filter
is used to smooth the FWEs. With a step size of 0.25 seconds,
120 points correspond to a 30-second section of the FWEs.
A longer smoothing filter is used to capture the prominent
seizure-like activity. Figure 3 presents an example of the FWE
and the smoothed FWE for a 4-hour SEEG data of one of
the patients. The detected seizures are shown by a numeric
index within a thick box. The magnified view of the FWE in
the neighborhood of the one of the detected seizure (seizure
number: 2) is shown in Fig. 4. It can be seen in that the FWE
attributes a higher energy during a seizure than during a nonseizure activity.
D. Stage III
The final detection criterion is defined in stage III, and
a potential seizure is marked if the gradient of the adjacent
smooth FWE (Q(p)) is positive for consecutive 120 points. At
each 0.25 seconds one FWE is obtained. After performing a
smoothing operation, small fluctuations arising in the FWE are
removed. Each smoothed FWE is represented by Q(p), where
p is the new time index at every 0.25 seconds. During a seizure

79

Fig. 5. A graphical presentation of the gradient-based classification algorithm.

At each instant, if the gradient (difference of the current FWE to the
previous FWE) is positives the detection counter is incremented. This counter
allows us to capture the duration-based evolution in the FWE, which enables
classification of the data into two classes, namely, the seizure or the nonseizure activity.

evolution, an increase in the amplitude or frequency or both

is distinctly observed as compared to the background. Hence,
an evolution-like process is observed in the smoothed FWEs.
This observation is used for the detection of the seizures. The
gradient is computed using
k =

d
= Q(p) Q(p 1)
dp

(4)

and graphically presented in Fig.5.

A counter is used to find consecutive positive gradients. If
k > 0, an increment in the counter is performed. If k < 0
the counter is reset to zero. As soon as the counter reaches
120, a potential seizure is marked in the SEEG file and the
counter resets to zero. This counter allows the detection of
the constant increase in the FWE observed during a seizure.
If two detections are made within a span of 60 seconds, they
are considered to be part of the same seizure.
III. RESULTS
The performance of the proposed algorithm was tested on
complete 100 hours of SEEG data of five different patients.
We use two statistical measures, sensitivity and false detection
rate, to evaluate the performance of the algorithm. Since
the main objective of the system is to detect the seizures,
sensitivity is the most important element of the performance.
True Positives (T P E ): Number of true seizures identified
by the EEG experts.

TABLE I
S UMMARY OF THE DETECTION FOR EACH PATIENT
S.No.

Duration

TPE

TPA

FPA

F NA

ST (%)

SP (%)

21

100

100

20

100

50

0.3

20

100

50

0.15

20

83.33

45.45

0.3

20

12

12

100

66.67

0.3

FDR

Fig. 6. An example of the true seizure detected using the proposed algorithm.
The black thick line represents the time instance when algorithm detects
the seizure and is marked on the EEG data, which is reviewed later for
performance analysis of the algorithm.

T P E = True seizures marked by EEG expert, T P A = True positive detected by the

algorithm, F P A = False positive detected by algorithm, F N A = False negative detected
by algorithm,ST = Sensitivity (%), SP = Specificity (%), Duration (hours) and FDR =
False detection rate per hour.

True Positives (T P A ): Number of true seizures detected

by the algorithm.
False Positives (F P A ): Events identified as seizures by
the algorithm, but not by the EEG experts.
False Negatives (F N A ): Events identified as seizures by
the EEG experts, but were missed by the algorithm.
Sensitivity: Ratio of the number of true seizures detected
by the algorithm to the total number of seizures marked
by the experts and is given by ST = T P A /T P E .
Specificity: Ratio of the number of seizures detected by
the algorithm to the total number of true positives and
false positives detected by the algorithm and is given by
SP = T P A /(T P A + F P A ).
False detection rate (FDR): Number of false detections/hour.

The SEEG data of the five patients consisted of three different

types of seizures. Three patients had long rhythmic (> 60
seconds) slow evolving seizures. One patient had a very short
duration seizure (~20 seconds). There was one seizure missed
in this particular patient. One patient had two different types of
seizures: Type I seizure having mixed frequency with minimal
amplitude change from the background, and Type II seizure
which are short seizures with mixed frequencies. Summary
of the detection for each patient using the proposed method
is shown in Table I. An example of one of the detected
seizure is shown in Fig. 6. The black arrow indicates the
time at which a potential seizure is observed by the algorithm
and marked in the SEEG file. There was increased false
detection in two patients. A careful review provided an insight
for the cause of such increased false positives. Majority of
the false detections were uninteresting. They consisted of
large amplitude bursts, low amplitude activity followed by an
increase in the amplitude. Some of the false positives had
a slow amplitude increase with a frequency variation. The
algorithm is very sensitive to such variations and hence, all
such activities were detected.
A few of the false detections were those where only the
frequency changed for a short duration. One such example
of false detection is shown in Fig. 7. Such changes were
reflected in the FWE which resulted in a false detection.
Another example of a false positive is shown in Fig. 8. The
proposed method detected the seizures in the five patients with
an overall sensitivity of 96.67% and a FDR of 0.21/h.

80

Fig. 7. An example of uninteresting false detection observed in one of the

patient data. It can be seen that there is transition of frequency which might
have resulted in the false detection.

Fig. 8. An example of false detection due to sudden burst of high amplitude

activity.

IV. C ONCLUSION
We have presented a method for the seizure detection
for intracerebral/stereoencephalograms using the frequencyweighted energy with an overall sensitivity of 96.67% and a
false detection rate of 0.21/h. The method relies on evolutionlike characteristic during the seizures, which enables the
algorithm to be independent of any fixed detection threshold. It
offers a performance that is promising and requires no a priori
information about the seizure for training. The algorithm uses
only one feature and hence, additional features would enhance
the performance thereby reducing the false positives; and this
research is presently being conducted.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank Stellate Systems, Montreal,
Canada for providing the SEEG data used in the present study.
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