A visual EEG epilepsy detection method based on a wavelet statistical representation and the Kullback-Leibler divergence

Abstract

This paper presents a statistical signal processing method for the characterization of EEG of patients suffering from epilepsy. A statistical model is proposed for the signals and the Kullback-Leibler divergence is used to study the differences between Seizure/Non-Seizure in patients suffering from epilepsy. Precisely, EEG signals are transformed into multivariate coefficients through multilevel 1D wavelet decomposition of different brain frequencies. The generalized Gaussian distribution (GGD) is shown to model precisely these coefficients. Patients are compared based on the analytical development of Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) of their corresponding GGD distributions. The method has been applied to a dataset of 18 epileptic signals of 9 patients. Results show a clear discrepancy between Seizure/Non-Seizure in epileptic signals, which helps in determining the onset of the seizure.