A Multistage Cascaded Neural Network Model to Identify the Severity of Epileptic Attack

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder characterized by recurrent seizures, impacting the quality of life for millions of individuals worldwide. Timely and accurate detection of epileptic seizures is crucial for proper diagnosis and effective treatment. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals provide vital information about brain activity and serve as a valuable tool for epilepsy detection. The methodology opted for this study was an enhanced multilayer feed forward neural network for automatic detection of epilepsy from EEG signals and hence predicting the severity. The authors build a multistage cascaded neural network model for achieving the same. Initially a Simple Artificial Neural Network (SimpleANN) is designed to classify EEG segments into seizure, healthy and interictal. Later a Multilayer Feed Forward Neural Network (MFFNN) is employed for detecting the severity of epileptic patients and hence can be classified into primary and secondary stages. The experimental results showed that the proposed SimpleANN classifier had provided noticeable results, and outperforms all tested classifiers. The study involves the collection of EEG data from a diverse group of patients, including those with epilepsy and healthy individuals. This automated epilepsy identifying system passes through different stages including decomposition, feature extraction for achieving a better performance model. The proposed system was tested and compared with SVM, KNN, MLP and Decision Tree under different measurement metrics. ANN has managed to give an accuracy of 80 - 90% which is significantly higher as compared to other machine learning models. The proposed work can automatically learn complex patterns from EEG data provides an advantage in identifying subtle seizure related features that may not be evident through manual analysis. Furthermore, the model offers real-time capabilities, making it suitable for continuous monitoring of patients at risk of seizures.