Date of Award

5-2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Legacy Department

Computer Engineering

Committee Member

Dr. Robert Schalkoff, Committee Chair

Committee Member

Dr. Brian Dean

Committee Member

Dr. Carl Baum

Abstract

Diagnosis of epilepsy or epileptic transients AEP (Abnormal Epileptiform Paroxysmal) is tedious, but important, and an expensive process. The process involves trained neurologists going over the patient's EEG records looking for epileptiform discharge like events and classifying it as AEP (Abnormal Epileptiform Paroxysmal) or non-AEP. The objective of this research is to automate the process of detecting such events and classifying them into AEP(definitely an Epileptiform Transient) and non-AEPs (unlikely an epileptiform transient). The problem is approached in two separate steps and cascaded to validate and analyze the performance of the overall system. The first step is a detection problem to find the Epileptiform like transients (ETs) from the Electroencephalograph (EEG) of a patient. A Radial basis function-based neural network has been trained using a training set consisting of examples from both classes (ETs and non-ETs). The ETs are the yellow boxes which are marked by expert neurologists. There are no particular examples of non-ETs and any data not annotated by experts can be considered to be examples of non-ETs. The second step is classification of the detected ETs also known as yellow boxes, into AEPs or non-AEPs. A similar Radial basis function-based neural network has been trained using the ETs marked and classified into AEPs and non-AEPs manually by seven expert neurologists. The annotations or yellow boxes along with the contextual signal was used to extract features using the Hilbert Huang Transform. The system is validated by considering an entire epoch of the patient EEG and potential ETs are identified using the detector. The potential ETs marked by the detector are classified into AEPs and non-AEPs and compared against the annotations marked by the experts.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.