Millions of Brazilians are affected with epilepsy and the access to early diagnosis is crucial for their adequate treatment. However, epilepsy diagnosis depends on the evaluation of longduration electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings performed by trained professionals, turning it in a time-consuming process which is not readily available for many patients. Thus, the present work proposes a methodology for automatic EEG classification of epileptic subjects which uses short-duration EEG recordings obtained with the patient at rest. The system is based on machine learning algorithms that use an attribute extracted from the power spectral density of EEG signals. This attribute is an estimate of functional connectivity between EEG channel pairs and is called debiased weighted phase-lag index. The classification algorithms were linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and support vector machines (SVM). EEG signs were acquired during the interictal state, i.e., between seizures and had no epileptiform activity. Recordings of 11 epileptic patients and 7 healthy
subjects were used to evaluate the method’s performance. Both algorithms reached their maximum classification performances, 100 % accuracy and area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) curve, when a feature vector with 190 attributes was used as input. The results show the efficacy of the proposed system, given its high classification performance.
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