Interpretable SincNet-Based Spatiotemporal Neural Network for Seizure Prediction

Spatiotemporal convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have emerged as potent tools for seizure prediction (SP) using electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, probing spatiotemporal biomarkers in epileptic brains. Nevertheless, it poses significant challenges for clinical practice due to the poor interpretability of learned features and the numerous trainable parameters in existing CNNs. To improve the interpretability and performance, this study proposed an interpretable SincNet-based architecture for spatiotemporal CNNs, encompassing EEGNet-8,2, ShallowConvNet, DeepConvNet, and EEGWaveNet, enabling direct visualization of the bandpass temporal filter range using a sinc-convolution layer. Furthermore, we also constructed a visualization analysis method to demonstrate the crucial spatiotemporal features learned by the proposed optimal CNN. Results on the CHB-MIT dataset revealed that both ShallowConvNet and EEGWaveNet had significantly improved performance with more lightweight parameters. Notably, the architecture enabled ShallowConvNet to achieve an average accuracy of 87.2%, sensitivity of 88.3%, weighted F1-score of 87.1%, and AUC of 92.7% for 21 epilepsy patients. Besides, the visualization outcomes underscored the ability of the optimal model to extract statistically significant spatiospectral energy differences within high-frequency EEG bands for SP classification tasks.