Separation of rhythms of EEG signals based on Hilbert-Huang transformation with application to seizure detection

Abstract

We present a new method for separation of the rhythms of the electroencephalogram (EEG) signal. The proposed method is based on the Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT). The HHT consists two steps namely empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and the Hilbert transform (HT). The EMD decomposes EEG signal into set of narrow-band intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), and the Hilbert transformation of these IMFs provide instantaneous frequency estimation of the IMFs. The instantaneous frequency estimation of IMFs have been used as a feature to identify the IMFs in order to separate rhythms of EEG signal. The central tendency measure (CTM) has been used to quantify the variability in second order difference (SOD) plots of rhythms of the EEG signal. The CTM parameter is very effective to discriminate epileptic seizure EEG signals from the seizure-free EEG signals. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method for epileptic seizure detection. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.