Unsupervised domain adaptation for cross-patient seizure classification

Objective. Epileptic seizure is a chronic neurological disease affecting millions of patients. Electroencephalogram (EEG) is the gold standard in epileptic seizure classification. However, its low signal-to-noise ratio, strong non-stationarity, and large individual difference nature make it difficult to directly extend the seizure classification model from one patient to another. This paper considers multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation for cross-patient EEG-based seizure classification, i.e. there are multiple source patients with labeled EEG data, which are used to label the EEG trials of a new patient. Approach. We propose an source domain selection (SDS)-global domain adaptation (GDA)-target agent subdomain adaptation (TASA) approach, which includes SDS to filter out dissimilar source domains, GDA to align the overall distributions of the selected source domains and the target domain, and TASA to identify the most similar source domain to the target domain so that its labels can be utilized. Main results. Experiments on two public seizure datasets demonstrated that SDS-GDA-TASA outperformed 13 existing approaches in unsupervised cross-patient seizure classification. Significance. Our approach could save clinicians plenty of time in labeling EEG data for epilepsy patients, greatly increasing the efficiency of seizure diagnostics.