Semisupervised Seizure Prediction in Scalp EEG Using Consistency Regularization

Early prediction of epilepsy seizures can warn the patients to take precautions and improve their lives significantly. In recent years, deep learning has become increasingly predominant in seizure prediction. However, existing deep learning-based approaches in this field require a great deal of labeled data to guarantee performance. At the same time, labeling EEG signals does require the expertise of an experienced pathologist and is incredibly time-consuming. To address this issue, we propose a novel Consistency-based Semisupervised Seizure Prediction Model (CSSPM), where only a fraction of training data is labeled. Our method is based on the principle of consistency regularization, which underlines that a robust model should maintain consistent results for the same input under extra perturbations. Specifically, by using stochastic augmentation and dropout, we consider the entire neural network as a stochastic model and apply a consistency constraint to penalize the difference between the current prediction and previous predictions. In this way, unlabeled data could be fully utilized to improve the decision boundary and enhance prediction performance. Compared with existing studies requiring all training data to be labeled, the proposed method only needs a small portion of data to be labeled while still achieving satisfactory results. Our method provides a promising solution to alleviate the labeling cost for real-world applications.