A Neural Net That Diagnoses Epilepsy
Around 50 million people suffer from epilepsy–about 1 percent of the world’s population, say Forrest Sheng Bao at Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, and a few pals.

But diagnosing the condition is tricky. The gold standard is a recording of the electrical activity during a fit as measured by video and electroencephalogram (EEG) data. Of course, this kind of data is tremendously hard to get because of the disruption it causes to patients’ lives. Imagine wearing the necessary electrodes and being within sight of a video camera continuously over a period of days, or even weeks.
In addition to this, some 70 or 80 percent of sufferers live in the developing world, where these kinds of measurements are even more impractical.
Bao and colleagues have come up with a system that may have a dramatic impact. Various groups have attempted to automate the process of epilepsy diagnosis using pattern recognition programs to spot the characteristic signature of the condition in EEG data. But these all depend on the EEG-video data that is so hard to get.
Bao and Co. have come up with a way to automatically diagnose epilepsy using data from recordings taken between fits, called interictal data. Obviously, this data is much easier to take.
The team developed the system by training a neural network to recognize the characteristic patterns in interictal data that indicate that the patient is epileptic. And the researchers claim an accuracy rate of 94 percent–about the same as experienced human operators, who usually have to strip various kinds of noise and artifacts out of the data before they can do their job.
That looks like impressive work that could have a major impact on the way that the disease is handled, particularly in the developing world.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0904.3808: Automated Epilepsy Diagnosis Using Interictal Scalp EEG
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like.
New large language models will transform many jobs. Whether they will lead to widespread prosperity or not is up to us.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
GPT-4 is bigger and better than ChatGPT—but OpenAI won’t say why
We got a first look at the much-anticipated big new language model from OpenAI. But this time how it works is even more deeply under wraps.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.