Advancing Epileptic Seizure Recognition Through Bidirectional LSTM Networks

Sanaa Almarzouki^*

• King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Seizure detection in a timely and accurate manner remains a primary challenge in clinical neurology, affecting diagnosis planning and patient management. Most of the traditional methods rely on feature extraction and traditional machine learning techniques, which are not efficient in capturing the dynamic characteristics of neural signals. It is the aim of this study to address such limitations by designing a deep learning model from bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) networks in a bid to enhance epileptic seizure identification reliability and accuracy. The dataset used, drawn from Kaggle's Epileptic Seizure Recognition challenge, consists of 11,500 samples with 179 features per sample corresponding to different electroencephalogram (EEG) readings. Data preprocessing was utilized to normalize and structure the input to the deep learning model. The proposed BiLSTM model employs sophisticated architecture to leverage temporal dependency and bidirectional data flows. It incorporates multiple dense and dropout layers alongside batch normalization to enhance the capability of the model in learning from the EEG data in an efficient manner. It supports end-to-end feature learning from the raw EEG signals without the need for intensive preprocessing and feature engineering. BiLSTM model performed better than others with 98.70% accuracy on the validation set and surpassed traditional techniques. The F1-score and other statistical metrics also validated the performance of the model as the confusion matrix achieved high values for recall and precision. The results confirm the capability of bidirectional LSTM networks to better identify seizures with significant improvements over conventional practices. Apart from facilitating seizure detection in a reliable fashion, the method improves the overall field of biomedical signal processing and can also be used in real-time observation and intervention protocols.