Author(s)

Daniel Schang¹, Pierre Chauvet², Sylvie Nguyen The Tich³, Bassam Daya⁴, Nisrine Jrad², Marc Gibaud⁵

¹ESEO Tech, Angers, France.
²UCO-LARIS-UBL, Angers, France.
³CHRU de Lille, Hopital Albert Calmette, Lille, France.
⁴Institute of Technology, Lebanese University, Saida, Lebanon.
⁵CHU-LARIS-UBL, Angers, France.

Many preterm infants suffer from neural disorders caused by early birth complications. The detection of children with neurological risk is an important challenge. The electroencephalogram is an important technique for establishing long-term neurological prognosis. Within this scope, the goal of this study is to propose an automatic detection of abnormal preterm babies’ electroencephalograms (EEG). A corpus of 316 neonatal EEG recordings of 100 infants born after less than 35 weeks of gestation were preprocessed and a time series of standard deviation was computed. This time series was thresholded to detect Inter Burst Intervals (IBI). Temporal features were extracted from bursts and IBI. Feature selection was carried out with classification in one step so as to select the best combination of features in terms of classification performance. Two classifiers were tested: Multiple Linear Regressions and Support Vector Machines (SVM). Performance was computed using cross validations. Methods were validated on a corpus of 100 infants with no serious brain damage. The Multiple Linear Regression method shows the best results with a sensitivity of 86.11% ± 10.01%, a specificity of 77.44% ± 7.62% and an AUC (Area under the ROC curves) of 0.82 ± 0.04. An accurate detection of abnormal EEG for preterm infants is feasible. This study is a first step towards an automatic analysis of the premature brain, making it possible to lighten the physician’s workload in the future.

Automatic EEG Analysis, Machine Learning, Multiple Linear Regressions, Preterm Infants, Support Vector Machines

Schang, D. , Chauvet, P. , Tich, S. , Daya, B. , Jrad, N. and Gibaud, M. (2018) Automatic Abnormal Electroencephalograms Detection of Preterm Infants. Journal of Data Analysis and Information Processing, 6, 141-155. doi: 10.4236/jdaip.2018.64009.