Augmenting DL with Adversarial Training for Robust Prediction of Epilepsy Seizures

Abstract

Epilepsy is a chronic medical condition that involves abnormal brain activity causing patients to lose control of awareness or motor activity. As a result, detection of pre-ictal states, before the onset of a seizure, can be lifesaving. The problem is challenging because it is difficult to discern between electroencephalogram signals in pre-ictal states versus signals in normal inter-ictal states. There are three key challenges that have not been addressed previously: (1) the inconsistent performance of prediction models across patients, (2) the lack of perfect prediction to protect patients from any episode, and (3) the limited amount of pre-ictal labeled data for advancing machine learning methods. This article addresses these limitations through a novel approach that uses adversarial examples with optimized tuning of a combined convolutional neural network and gated recurrent unit. Compared to the state of the art, the results showed an improvement of 3x in model robustness as measured in reduced variations and superior accuracy of the area under the curve, with an average increase of 6.7%. The proposed method also exhibited superior performance with other advances in the field of machine learning and customized for epilepsy prediction including data augmentation with Gaussian noise and multitask learning.