Detection of focal and non-focal EEG signals using non-linear features derived from empirical wavelet transform rhythms

Surgery is recommended for epilepsy diagnosis in cases where patients do not respond well to anti-epilepsy medications. Successful surgery is essentially dependent on the area suffered from epilepsy, i.e., focal area. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are considered a powerful tool to identify focal or non-focal (normal) areas. In this work, we propose an automated method for focal and non-focal EEG signal identification, taking into account non-linear features derived from rhythms in the empirical wavelet transform (EWT) domain. The research paradigm is related to the decomposition of EEG signals into the delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma rhythms through the development of the EWT. Specifically, various non-linear features are extracted from rhythms composed of Stein’s unbiased risk estimation entropy, threshold entropy, centered correntropy, and information potential. From a statistical point of view, Kruskal–Wallis (KW) statistical test is then used to identify the significant features. The significant features obtained from the KW test are fed to support vector machine (SVM) and k-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifiers. The SURE entropy provides an average classification accuracy of 93% and 82.6% for small and entire datasets by utilizing SVM and KNN classifiers with a tenfold cross-validation method, respectively. It is observed that the proposed method is better and competitive in comparison with other studies for small and large data, respectively. The obtained outcome concludes that the proposed framework could be used for people with epilepsy and can help the physicians to validate the assessment.