Improving self-supervised pretraining models for epileptic seizure detection from EEG data

There is abundant medical data on the internet, most of which are unlabeled. Traditional supervised learning algorithms are often limited by the amount of labeled data, especially in the medical domain, where labeling is costly in terms of human processing and specialized experts needed to label them. They are also prone to human error and biased as a select few expert annotators label them. These issues are mitigated by Self-supervision, where we generate pseudo-labels from unlabelled data by seeing the data itself. This paper presents various self-supervision strategies to enhance the performance of a time-series based Diffusion convolution recurrent neural network (DCRNN) model. The learned weights in the self-supervision pretraining phase can be transferred to the supervised training phase to boost the model's prediction capability. Our techniques are tested on an extension of a Diffusion Convolutional Recurrent Neural network (DCRNN) model, an RNN with graph diffusion convolutions, which models the spatiotemporal dependencies present in EEG signals. When the learned weights from the pretraining stage are transferred to a DCRNN model to determine whether an EEG time window has a characteristic seizure signal associated with it, our method yields an AUROC score 1.56% than the current state-of-the-art models on the TUH EEG seizure corpus.