Epileptic spike detection using a Kalman filter based approach.

The electroencephalogram (EEG) consists of an underlying background process with superimposed transient nonstationarities such as epileptic spikes (ESs). The detection of ESs in the EEG is of particular importance in the diagnosis of epilepsy. In this paper a new approach for detecting ESs in EEG recordings is presented. It is based on a time-varying autoregressive model (TVAR) that makes use of the nonstationarities of the EEG signal. The autoregressive (AR) parameters are estimated via Kalman filtering (KF). In our method, the EEG signal is first preprocessed to accentuate ESs and attenuate background activity, and then passed through a thresholding function to determine ES locations. The proposed method is evaluated using simulated signals as well as real inter-ictal EEGs.