Towards Modality-Agnostic Seizure Classification: A Unified Deep Learning Framework for Heterogeneous EEG and Intracranial EEG Signals

Abstract

Seizure prediction and detection, essential for clinical treatment of epilepsy, remain the crucial task of this neurological disease. EEG and iEEG are widely used to analyze epilepsy due to its capability of capturing discriminative brain activities at high time resolution. However, existing works generally analyze either EEG or iEEG seizure activity separately, where EEG analysis has been well-researched, while more and more works consider iEEG for its higher specificity at the spatial level and signal quality. Currently, most of the existing seizure prediction systems are single-modal in nature, which limits its application to a variety of clinical conditions. Therefore, a common framework to analyze seizures with both EEG and iEEG signals needs to be developed. This paper presents a new framework of multimodal seizure classification integrating the heterogeneous EEG and iEEG recordings from different subjects and sources. A specific framework, called Unified Multimodal Signal Harmonization (UMSH), is developed for harmonizing signals with varied sampling rates and recording conditions. Moreover, to handle the extremely class-imbalanced problem in the data sets, we use a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) based data augmentation technique to generate synthetic samples to balance the class distribution. The proposed framework uses the EEGNet-Vision Transformer (EEGNet-ViT) as the feature extraction and classification network to learn the local discriminative patterns as well as global contextual information in the multimodal seizure data. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for robust seizure classification, emphasizing the potential of integrated EEG-iEEG multimodal learning in advancing next-generation epilepsy monitoring and clinical decision-support systems.