Research Article
ConvolutionalNeuralNetworkforSeizureDetectionofNocturnal
Frontal Lobe Epilepsy
Fabio Pisano ,
1
Giuliana Sias ,
1
Alessandra Fanni ,
1
Barbara Cannas,
1
Ant´ onio Dourado ,
2
Barbara Pisano,
1
and Cesar A. Teixeira
2
1
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari, Cagliari 09123, Italy
2
Univ Coimbra, CISUC-Center for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra,
Department of Informatics Engineering, Coimbra, Portugal
Correspondence should be addressed to Fabio Pisano; fabio.pisano@diee.unica.it
Received 9 September 2019; Accepted 22 February 2020; Published 31 March 2020
Guest Editor: Murari Andrea
Copyright © 2020 Fabio Pisano et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
e Nocturnal Frontal Lobe Epilepsy (NFLE) is a form of epilepsy in which seizures occur predominantly during sleep. In other
forms of epilepsy, the commonly used clinical approach mainly involves manual inspection of encephalography (EEG) signals,
a laborious and time-consuming process which often requires the contribution of more than one experienced neurologist. In
the last decades, numerous approaches to automate this detection have been proposed and, more recently, machine learning
has shown very promising performance. In this paper, an original Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture is
proposed to develop patient-specific seizure detection models for three patients affected by NFLE. e performances, in terms
of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity, exceed by several percentage points those in the most recent literature. e capability of
the patient-specific models has been also tested to compare the obtained seizure onset times with those provided by the
neurologists, with encouraging results. Moreover, the same CNN architecture has been used to develop a cross-patient seizure
detection system, resorting to the transfer-learning paradigm. Starting from a patient-specific model, few data from a new
patient are enough to customize his model. is contribution aims to alleviate the task of neurologists, who may have a robust
indication to corroborate their clinical conclusions.
1. Introduction
Nocturnal frontal lobe epilepsy (NFLE) is a rare form of
epilepsy, typically inherited, which affects both sexes from 1
to 60 years, and is associated with cognitive decline. Crises
are characterized by frequent and brief hypermotor sleep
seizures, which may range from a simple awakening from
sleep to more focused motor movements, with dystonic and
tonic postures, grimaces, screams or groans, episodic noc-
turnal wanderings, and stereotyped agitated somnambulism,
among others [1, 2]. In this paper, the problem of detecting
NFLE seizures, using Electroencephalographic (EEG) signals
as inputs to an original Convolutional Neural Network
(CNN) prediction model, is addressed.
e use of EEG signals is corroborated by most of the
literature on epileptic seizure detection, which considers
indeed the EEG the gold standard to analyse the electrical
activity of the brain [3].
In the literature, there is a wide range of proposals for the
identification of general epileptic seizures [4–13], mostly
based on the machine-learning approach, which support the
doctors in the time-consuming manual labelling [4].
However, very few contributions specifically dealing with
NFLE are present, and they reach lower performance in-
dices. In [14], a detection system for NFLE seizures has been
proposed, which is based on accelerometer signals, obtaining
a value of sensitivity of 91.67% and specificity of 84.19% on
three pediatric patients. e accelerometers were already
proposed in [15, 16] to detect epileptic seizures with pros and
cons; even if they are more comfortable to wear, they can
only reveal seizures associated to motor activity. Moreover,
high false-positive rates are often possible due to motion
Hindawi
Complexity
Volume 2020, Article ID 4825767, 10 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/4825767