Automatic classification of hyperkinetic, tonic, and tonic-clonic seizures using unsupervised clustering of video signals

IntroductionThis study evaluated the accuracy of motion signals extracted from video monitoring data to differentiate epileptic motor seizures in patients with drug-resistant epilepsy. 3D near-infrared video was recorded by the Nelli® seizure monitoring system (Tampere, Finland).Methods10 patients with 130 seizures were included in the training dataset, and 17 different patients with 98 seizures formed the testing dataset. Only seizures with unequivocal hyperkinetic, tonic, and tonic-clonic semiology were included. Motion features from the catch22 feature collection extracted from video were explored to transform the patients' videos into numerical time series for clustering and visualization.ResultsChanges in feature generation provided incremental discrimination power to differentiate between hyperkinetic, tonic, and tonic-clonic seizures. Temporal motion features showed the best results in the unsupervised clustering analysis. Using these features, the system differentiated hyperkinetic, tonic and tonic-clonic seizures with 91, 88, and 45% accuracy after 100 cross-validation runs, respectively. F1-scores were 93, 90, and 37%, respectively. Overall accuracy and f1-score were 74%.ConclusionThe selected features of motion distinguished semiological differences within epileptic seizure types, enabling seizure classification to distinct motor seizure types. Further studies are needed with a larger dataset and additional seizure types. These results indicate the potential of video-based hybrid seizure monitoring systems to facilitate seizure classification improving the algorithmic processing and thus streamlining the clinical workflow for human annotators in hybrid (algorithmic-human) seizure monitoring systems.