Software advancements in automatic epilepsy diagnosis and seizure detection: 10-year review

Abstract

Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder that may be diagnosed and monitored using routine diagnostic tests like Electroencephalography (EEG). However, manual introspection and analysis of EEG signals is presently difficult and repetitive task even for experienced neuro-technologists with high false-positive rates and inter- and intra-rater reliability. Software advancements using Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms have the potential to early detect and predict abnormal patterns observed in EEG signals. The present review focuses on systematically reporting software advancements and their implementation using hardware systems in automatic epilepsy diagnosis and seizure detection for the past 10 years. Traditional, hybrid, and end-to-end AI-based pipelines and associated EEG datasets have been discussed. The review summarizes and compares reported articles, datasets, and patents through various subjective and objective parameters in this field. Latest advancements demonstrate that AI-based pipelines can reduce the introspection time by at least 50% without compromising the diagnostic accuracy or abnormal event detection. A significant rise in hardware implementation of software-based pipelines, end-to-end deep learning architectures for real-time analysis, and granted patents has been noticed since 2011. More than twenty-eight datasets have been developed to automatically diagnose epileptic EEG signals from 2001 to 2023. Extensive analysis using explainability tools, cross-dataset generalizations, reproducibility analysis, and ablation experiments can further improve the existing AI-based pipelines in this field. There is a need for the development of standardized protocols for data collection and its AI pipeline for a robust, inter- and intra-rater reliability-free, and real-time automatic epilepsy diagnosis.