An Active Dry-Contact Continuous EEG Monitoring System for Seizure Detection Applications in Clinical Neurophysiology.

Abstract

Young children and infants, especially newborns, are highly susceptible to seizures, which, if undetected and untreated, can lead to severe long-term neurological consequences. Early detection typically requires continuous electroencephalography (cEEG) monitoring in hospital settings, involving costly equipment and highly trained specialists. This study presents a low-cost, active dry-contact electrode-based, adjustable electroencephalography (EEG) headset, combined with an explainable deep learning model for seizure detection from reduced-montage EEG, and a multimodal artifact removal algorithm to enhance signal quality. EEG signals were acquired via active electrodes and processed through a custom-designed analog front end for filtering and digitization. The adjustable headset was fabricated using three-dimensional printing and laser cutting to accommodate varying head sizes. The deep learning model was trained to detect neonatal seizures in real time, and a dedicated multimodal algorithm was implemented for artifact removal while preserving seizure-relevant information. System performance was evaluated in a representative clinical setting on a pediatric patient with absence seizures, with simultaneous recordings obtained from the proposed device and a commercial wet-electrode cEEG system for comparison. Signals from the proposed system exhibited a correlation coefficient exceeding 0.8 with those from the commercial device. Signal-to-noise ratio analysis indicated noise mitigation performance comparable to the commercial system. The deep learning model achieved accuracy and recall improvements of 2.76% and 16.33%, respectively, over state-of-the-art approaches. The artifact removal algorithm effectively identified and eliminated noise while preserving seizure-related EEG features.