Classifying cross-frequency coupling pattern in epileptogenic tissues by convolutional neural network.

The phase-amplitude coupling in EEG signal of different frequencies is considered as a useful biomarker in delineating epileptogenic tissues, but some physiological processes can also generate phase-amplitude coupling pattern, such as memory process. Current analysis on cross-frequency coupling (CFC) feature is mostly based on extracting the strength of coupling but not coupling patterns in frequency-frequency domain. In this paper, we proposed a method for identifying epileptogenic tissue using convolutional neural networks (CNN) based on CFC pattern. Stereo-electroencephalograph (SEEG) from six patients with intractable epilepsy were used in this analysis. First, modulation indexes (MIs) were calculated using a moving window for each channel across seizures. Then those MIs were marked as inside epileptogenic zone (EZ) or outside EZ based on the surgical resection area. CNN was trained by those two-dimensional coupling patterns and tested by leave-one-out method. The receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve was further generated. The results showed that average area-under-curve (AUC) performance reached 0.88. The sensitivity was 0.81, and the specificity was 0.79. Those results suggest that the CFC pattern can be used to identify SEEG channels in the epileptogenic region using the CNN.Clinical Relevance- This method has the potential to be used as an analytical tool for neurologists to identify epileptogenic brain tissues.