The interpretation of electroencephalograms (EEGs) is a process that is still dependent on the subjective analysis of the examiners. Though interrater agreement on critical events such as seizures is high, it is much lower on subtler events (e.g., when there are benign variants). The process used by an expert to interpret an EEG is quite subjective and hard to replicate by machine. The performance of machine learning technology is far from human performance. We have been developing an interpretation system, AutoEEG, with a goal of exceeding human performance on this task. In this work, we are focusing on one of the early decisions made in this process – whether an EEG is normal or abnormal. We explore two baseline classification algorithms: k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) and Random Forest Ensemble Learning (RF). A subset of the TUH EEG Corpus was used to evaluate performance. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) was used to reduce the dimensionality of the data. kNN achieved a 41.8% detection error rate while RF achieved an error rate of 31.7%. These error rates are significantly lower than those obtained by random guessing based on priors (49.5%). The majority of the errors were related to misclassification of normal EEGs.

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The Neural Engineering Data Consortium (NEDC) is releasing its first major big data corpus -the Temple University Hospital EEG Corpus. This corpus consists of over 25,000 EEG studies, and includes a neurologist's interpretation of the test, a brief patient medical history and demographic information about the patient such as gender and age. For the first time, there is a sufficient amount of data to support the application of state of the art machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we present pilot results of experiments on the prediction of some basic attributes of an EEG from the raw EEG signal data using a 3,762 session subset of the corpus. Standard machine learning approaches are shown to be capable of predicting commonly occurring events from simple features with high accuracy on closed-loop testing, and can deliver error rates below 50% on a 6-way open set classification problem. This is very promising performance since commercial technology fails on this data.

Feature extraction for automatic classification of EEG signals typically relies on time frequency representations of the signal. Techniques such as cepstral-based filter banks or wavelets are popular analysis techniques in many signal processing applications including EEG classification. In this paper, we present a comparison of a variety of approaches to estimating and postprocessing features. To further aid in discrimination of periodic signals from aperiodic signals, we add a differential energy term. We evaluate our approaches on the TUH EEG Corpus, which is the largest publicly available EEG corpus and an exceedingly challenging task due to the clinical nature of the data. We demonstrate that a variant of a standard filter bank-based approach, coupled with first and second derivatives, provides a substantial reduction in the overall error rate. The combination of differential energy and derivatives produces a 24% absolute reduction in the error rate and improves our ability to discriminate between signal events and background noise. This relatively simple approach proves to be comparable to other popular feature extraction approaches such as wavelets, but is much more computationally efficient.

Clinical electroencephalographic (EEG) data varies significantly depending on a number of operational conditions (e.g., the type and placement of electrodes, the type of electrical grounding used). This investigation explores the statistical differences present in two different referential montages: Linked Ear (LE) and Averaged Reference (AR). Each of these accounts for approximately 45% of the data in the TUH EEG Corpus. In this study, we explore the impact this variability has on machine learning performance. We compare the statistical properties of features generated using these two montages, and explore the impact of performance on our standard Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based classification system. We show that a system trained on LE data significantly outperforms one trained only on AR data (77.2% vs. 61.4%). We also demonstrate that performance of a system trained on both data sets is somewhat compromised (71.4% vs. 77.2%). A statistical analysis of the data suggests that mean, variance and channel normalization should be considered. However, cepstral mean subtraction failed to produce an improvement in performance, suggesting that the impact of these statistical differences is subtler.

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Objective: to verify the prevalence of breastfeeding of preterm infants in neonatal units. Methods: an exploratory, cross-sectional study was performed at a Child-Friendly Hospital with 21 premature infants and their mothers. Interviews and a survey of medical records were performed using a form to collect data, which were analyzed through descriptive statistics. Results: the onset of milk feeding and breastfeeding was, respectively, 61.7 hours and 17.2 days on average. At hospital discharge, 47.6% of the preterm infants were breastfed; 47.6% were on exclusive breastfeeding; and 4.8% were on artificial milk feeding. At home, there were no changes in feeding patterns at seven to fifteen days after hospital discharge. Conclusion: it is necessary to strengthen actions for promotion, protection and support that encourage the practice of breastfeeding.

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