A Self-Interpretable Deep Learning Model for Seizure Prediction Using a Multi-Scale Prototypical Part Network

Abstract

The epileptic seizure prediction (ESP) method aims to timely forecast the occurrence of seizures, which is crucial to improving patients’ quality of life. Many deep learning-based methods have been developed to tackle this issue and achieve significant progress in recent years. However, the “black-box” nature of deep learning models makes the clinician mistrust the prediction results, severely limiting its clinical application. For this purpose, in this study, we propose a self-interpretable deep learning model for patient-specific epileptic seizure prediction: Multi-Scale Prototypical Part Network (MSPPNet). This model attempts to measure the similarity between the inputs and prototypes (learned during training) as evidence to make final predictions, which could provide a transparent reasoning process and decision basis (e.g., significant prototypes for inputs and corresponding similarity score). Furthermore, we assign different sizes to the prototypes in latent space to capture the multi-scale features of EEG signals. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that develops a self-interpretable deep learning model for seizure prediction, other than the existing post hoc interpretation studies. Our proposed model is evaluated on two public epileptic EEG datasets (CHB-MIT: 16 patients with a total of 85 seizures, Kaggle: 5 dogs with a total of 42 seizures), with a sensitivity of 93.8% and a false prediction rate of 0.054/h in the CHB-MIT dataset and a sensitivity of 88.6% and a false prediction rate of 0.146/h in the Kaggle dataset, achieving the current state-of-the-art performance with self-interpretable evidence.

Keywords

• Deep learning
• interpretability
• signal processing
• seizure prediction
• electroencephalography