Channel swapping of EEG signals for deep learning-based seizure detection

The purpose of epilepsy detection is to determine whether epilepsy has occurred by analysing the patient's electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Compared to traditional methods, epilepsy detection methods based on deep learning have achieved significant improvements in detection accuracy. However, when the number of training samples is limited, the model's detection performance often significantly declines. To address this issue, here a sample enhancement method based on electroencephalogram signal channel swapping is proposed. This method generates new electroencephalogram samples by exchanging electroencephalogram sequences from different channels, thereby expanding the training set and improving epilepsy detection accuracy in few-shot scenarios. Experiments using the Children's Hospital Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (CHB-MIT) dataset show that for training sets with 100, 500, and 1000 samples, detection accuracy improves from 0.6797 to 0.7789, 0.6952 to 0.8210, and 0.7273 to 0.8517, respectively. Compared to the sliding window method, the proposed method demonstrates higher accuracy in extreme low sample sizes. Combining both methods can further enhances detection performance, showing an improvement of approximately 8% across various configurations.