Performance investigation of epilepsy detection from noisy EEG signals using base-2-meta stacking classifier.

Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disease, characterized by spontaneous, unprovoked, recurrent seizures that may lead to long-term disability and premature death. Despite significant efforts made to improve epilepsy detection clinically and pre-clinically, the pervasive presence of noise in EEG signals continues to pose substantial challenges to their effective application. In addition, discriminant features for epilepsy detection have not been investigated yet. The objective of this study is to develop a hybrid model for epilepsy detection from noisy and fragmented EEG signals. We hypothesized that a hybrid model could surpass existing single models in epilepsy detection. Our approach involves manual noise rejection and a novel statistical channel selection technique to detect epilepsy even from noisy EEG signals. Our proposed Base-2-Meta stacking classifier achieved notable accuracy (0.98 ± 0.05), precision (0.98 ± 0.07), recall (0.98 ± 0.05), and F1 score (0.98 ± 0.04) even with noisy 5-s segmented EEG signals. Application of our approach to the specific problem like detection of epilepsy from noisy and fragmented EEG data reveals a performance that is not only superior to others, but also is translationally relevant, highlighting its potential application in a clinic setting, where EEG signals are often noisy or scanty. Our proposed metric DF-A (Discriminant feature-accuracy), for the first time, identified the most discriminant feature with models that give A accuracy or above (A = 95 used in this study). This groundbreaking approach allows for detecting discriminant features and can be used as potential electrographic biomarkers in epilepsy detection research. Moreover, our study introduces innovative insights into the understanding of these features, epilepsy detection, and cross-validation, markedly improving epilepsy detection in ways previously unavailable.

Investigating population-specific epilepsy detection from noisy EEG signals using deep-learning models.

"Epilepsy is a chronic brain disorder that affects people of all ages. The cause of epilepsy is often unknown and its effect in different age groups is not yet investigated. The main objective of this study is to introduce a novel approach that successfully detects epilepsy even from noisy EEG signals. In addition, this study also investigates population specific epilepsy detection for providing novel insights. Correspondingly, we utilized the TUH EEG corpus database, publicly available challenging multi-channel EEG database containing detailed patient information. We applied a band-pass filter and manual noise rejection to remove noise and artifacts from EEG signals. We then utilized statistical features and correlation to select channels, and applied different transform analysis methods such as continuous wavelet transform, spectrogram, and Wigner-Ville distribution, with and without ensemble averaging, to construct an image dataset. Afterwards, we used various deep-learning models for general analysis. Our findings suggest that different models such as DenseNet201, DenseNet169, DenseNet121, VGG16, VGG19, Xception, InceptionV3, and MobileNetV2 performed better while using images generated from different approaches in general analysis. Furthermore, we split the dataset into two sections according to age for population analysis. All the models that performed well in the general analysis were used for population analysis, which provided novel insights in epilepsy detection from EEG. Our proposed framework for epilepsy detection achieved 100% accuracy, which outperforms other concurrent methods."

Impact of demographic, environmental, socioeconomic, and government intervention on the spreading of COVID-19.

BACKGROUND: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is a worldwide epidemiological emergency, and the risk factors for the multiple waves with new COVID-19 strains are concerning. This study aims to identify the most significant risk factors for spreading COVID-19 to help policymakers take early measures for the next waves. METHODS: We conducted the study on randomly selected 29 countries where the pandemic had a downward trend in the daily active cases curve as of June 10, 2020. We investigated the association with the standardized spreading index and demographical, environmental, socioeconomic, and government intervention. To standardize the spreading index, we accounted for the number of tests and the timeline bias. Furthermore, we performed multiple linear regression to identify the relative importance of the variables. RESULTS: In the correlation analysis, air pollution, PM2.5 (r = 0.37, p = 0.0466), number of days to impose lockdown from first case (r = 0.38, p = 0.0424) and total confirmed cases on the first lockdown (r = 0.61, p = 0.0004) were associated with outcome measures. In the adjusted model, air pollution ( ß 1  = 4.5, p = 0.0127, |t| = 3.1) and overweight prevalence ( ß 1  = 4.7, p = 0.0187, |t| = 2.9) were the most significant exposure variable for spreading of COVID-19. CONCLUSION: Our findings showed that countries with larger PM2.5 values and comparatively more overweight populations are at higher risk of spreading COVID-19. Proper preventive measures may reduce the spreading.