A Long Short-Term Memory neural network for the detection of epileptiform spikes and high frequency oscillations

Over the last two decades, the evidence has been growing that in addition to epileptic spikes high frequency oscillations (HFOs) are important biomarkers of epileptogenic tissue. New methods of artificial intelligence such as deep learning neural networks can provide additional tools for automated analysis of EEG. Here we present a Long Short-Term Memory neural network for detection of spikes, ripples and ripples-on-spikes (RonS). We used intracranial EEG (iEEG) from two independent datasets. First dataset (7 patients) was used for network training and testing. The second dataset (5 patients) was used for cross-institutional validation. 1000 events of each class (spike, RonS, ripple and baseline) were selected from the candidates initially found using a novel threshold method. Network training was performed using random selections of 50–500 events (per class) from all patients from the 1^st dataset. This ‘global’ network was then tested on other events for each patient from both datasets. The network was able to detect events with a good generalisability namely, with total accuracy and specificity for each class exceeding 90% in all cases, and sensitivity less than 86% in only two cases (82.5% for spikes in one patient and 81.9% for ripples in another patient). The deep learning networks can significantly accelerate the analysis of iEEG data and increase their diagnostic value which may improve surgical outcome in patients with localization-related intractable epilepsy.