Unveiling encephalopathy signatures: A deep learning approach with locality-preserving features and hybrid neural network for EEG analysis

EEG signals exhibit spatio-temporal characteristics due to the neural activity dispersion in space over the brain and the dynamic temporal patterns of electrical activity in neurons. This study tries to effectively utilize the spatio-temporal nature of EEG signals for diagnosing encephalopathy using a combination of novel locality preserving feature extraction using Local Binary Patterns (LBP) and a custom fine-tuned Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network. A carefully curated primary EEG dataset is used to assess the effectiveness of the technique for treatment of encephalopathies. EEG signals of all electrodes are mapped onto a spatial matrix from which the custom feature extraction method isolates spatial features of the signals. These spatial features are further given to the neural network, which learns to combine the spatial information with temporal dynamics summarizing pertinent details from the raw EEG data. Such a unified representation is key to perform reliable disease classification at the output layer of the neural network, leading to a robust classification system, potentially providing improved diagnosis and treatment. The proposed method shows promising potential for enhancing the automated diagnosis of encephalopathy, with a remarkable accuracy rate of 90.5%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to compress and represent both spatial and temporal features into a single vector for encephalopathy detection, simplifying visual diagnosis and providing a robust feature for automated predictions. This advancement holds significant promise for ensuring early detection and intervention strategies in the clinical environment, which in turn enhances patient care.