Canine EEG helps human: cross-species and cross-modality epileptic seizure detection via multi-space alignment

Epilepsy significantly impacts global health, affecting about 65 million people worldwide, along with various animal species. The diagnostic processes of epilepsy are often hindered by the transient and unpredictable nature of seizures. Here we propose a multi-space alignment approach based on cross-species and cross-modality electroencephalogram (EEG) data to enhance the detection capabilities and understanding of epileptic seizures. By employing deep learning techniques, including domain adaptation and knowledge distillation, our framework aligns cross-species and cross-modality EEG signals to enhance the detection capability beyond traditional within-species and within-modality models. Experiments on multiple surfaces and intracranial EEG datasets of humans and canines demonstrated substantial improvements in detection accuracy, achieving over 90% AUC scores for cross-species and cross-modality seizure detection with extremely limited labeled data from the target species/modality. To our knowledge, this is the first study that demonstrates the effectiveness of integrating heterogeneous data from different species and modalities to improve EEG-based seizure detection performance. This is a pilot study that provides insights into the challenges and potential of multi-species and multi-modality data integration, offering an effective solution for future work to collect huge EEG data to train large brain models.