An EEG-Based Seizure Prediction Model Encoding Brain Network Temporal Dynamics

EEG-based seizure prediction enables timely treatment for patients, but its performance is limited by the difficulty in effectively characterizing the temporal dynamics of epileptic brain networks. Metastability, which describes recurring topographical patterns of spontaneous neural activity over time, provides a unique perspective for capturing the dynamic evolution before seizure onset. In this study, we propose a seizure prediction model that fuses consistent epileptic network processes across subjects into a higher-order latent space. Specifically, we first construct metastable transition patterns to identify the recurrent network states over time. Through adversarial feature learning, we then impose the metastability prior on the latent embedding space encoded via a variational autoencoder (VAE), while leveraging the maximum mean discrepancy measure (MMD) to further mitigate the patient gap. The latent representation, endowed with physiological priors, is ultimately utilized for patient-independent seizure prediction. We evaluate our method on two publicly available and one clinical scalp EEG datasets. Compared to the existing methods, our method has improved AUC, sensitivity, and specificity on CHB-MIT dataset by approximately 9%, 5%, and 5%, respectively. Our method shows that combining brain network-based physiological prior with deep learning for EEG representation learning is a brand-new strategy for associating seizures with complex brain network variations, enabling reliable patient-independent seizure prediction.