Beamformers and Higher Order Statistics for Biomedical Signals and Applications on Epilepsy Seizure Detection

Basak Esin Kokturk January 7, 2013

Introduction
Beamforming is a spatial ltering technique to control the directionality of the received or transmitted signal. The main idea behind the beamformer applications is to separate signals that were overlapping frequency content but all of them originate from dierent spatial locations. Bemaformers can be used both transmission and reception steps of a transducer array. To control the signals phase and amplitude, beamformers can be used in each transmitter and to reduce the interferences between dierent located signals, beamformers are used in the receivers by ampling all signals with dierent weight. Spatial ltering has several applications such as RADAR, SONAR, communications, imaging, biomedical etc. You can nd detail application list in Table 1 [1]. Table 1: Applications and Examples of Beamformers Application RADAR Description phased-array RADAR, air trac control,synthetic aperture radar source localization and classication directional transmission and reception, sector broadcast in satellite communications ultrasonic, optical, tomographic earth crust mapping, oil exploration References [2, 3, 4]

SONAR Communications

[5, 6] [7, 8, 9] . [10, 11] [12]

Imaging Geophysical Exploration Astrophysical Exploration Biomedical

high resolution imaging of the universe fatal heart monitoring, tissue hyperthermia,hearing aids

[13, 14]

[15, 16, 17]

Biomedical signals are highly correlated, small amplitude and noisy sig1

nals so to obtain meaningful information,to get information from biomedical signals signal to noise ratio (SNR) must be reduced by some signal processing techniques. Beamforming approach is one of these techniques and by adapting beamformers received signals can be adjusted using dierent weight to increase SNR. Recent years, beside the beamforming approach higher order statistics (HOS) are used to remove Gaussian noise from a non-Gaussian signal by transforming the signal on higher order cumulant domain. In this study, beamformers and higher order statistics algorithms were introduced and the applications on identifying epileptic seizure was addressed. The whole report follows the review Advances in EEg Signal Processing for Epilepsy Detection [18]. In the background section, there is a brief description about the higher order statistics, beamforming and epilepsy. The applications of these methods in the epilepsy detection in the literature were shown in the applications section. In the last section, the results and the utilities and eciencies of the methods were discussed.

Backgorund
Higher Order Statistics
Third or higher power of a sample is called as higher order statistics (HOS). HOS are not only include amplitude information but also include the phase information. This property of HOS is very important because second order statistics doesnt have phase information. The motivations behind the HOS are identifying non-Gaussian processes, identifying non-minimum phase systems and detecting non-linear properties of signals. HOS are applicable for non-Gaussian data and in reality, many process is non-Gaussian. Let {X(k)} is a real discrete time series signal with k = 0, 1, 2, 3, . . . and its moments up to nth order exist. Then nth order moment function that only depends on the time dierences 1 , 2 , . . . , n1 and can be dened as mx (1 , 2 , . . . , n1 ) E{X(k)X(k + 1 ) . . . X(k + n1 )} n where E{.} denotes the expectation. As known, second order moment is autocorrelation of X(k). For a non-Gaussian stationary random signal X(k) the nt h order cumulant function can be dened as the dierence between nt h moment of the signal and nt h moment of a Gaussian signal. cx (1 , 2 , . . . , n1 ) = mx (1 , 2 , . . . , n1 ) mG (1 , 2 , . . . , n1 ) n n n

Figure 1: Non-redundant region () of computation of the bispectrum for real signals [19].

If the signal is Gaussian then, cx (1 , 2 , . . . , n1 ) = 0. n Bispectrum parameters are used for feature selection using HOS. The power spectrum of a signal can be expressed via discrete Fourier transform of 2nd order cumulant function.
x P2 (f )

DF T (cx (m)) 2

=
m=

cx (m)ej2mf 2

Bispectrum is the spectrum of 3rd order cumulant;

B x (f1 , f2 ) =
m= n=

cx (m, n)ej2(mf1 +nf2 ) 3

So, bicoherence is Bic(f1 , f2 ) = B(f1 , f2 ) P (f1 )P (f2 )P (f1 + f2 )

The bispectrum of real valued signal can be express with the triangle 0 f2 f1 f1 +2 1 under there is no bispectral aliasing assumption. This region is named as non-redundant region or principal domain () The HOS based features can be expressed as 3

Mean of spectral magnitude for HOS: Mave = Entropy 1: P1 =

k

1 L

|B(f1 , f2 )|

pk logpk

and pk = Entropy 2: P2 =
i

|B(f1 , f2 )| |B(f1 , f2 )|

qi logqi

and qi = |B(f1 , f2 )|2 2 |B(f1 , f2 )|

Beamforming Approach
In signal processing perspective, the aim of using beamforming is to detect arriving signal with dierent locations without any interferences and noise. Beamforming can be handle in two categories; xed beamforming and adaptive beamforming. In xed beamforming, weight parameters are data independent and xed for all datasets, on the other hand in adaptive beamforming weights are adjustable according to data [20]. We can say that adaptive beamforming is superior to xed beamforming. Generally adaptive beamformers are used to increase the signal to noise ratio (SNR). If we think a beamforming process for m channel EEG signal with n sample time, our EEG signal can be dened as a matrix X Rmxn and the output of the beamformer is y R1xn . Then we can expressed the beamformer output as y = wT x where w Rmx1 is the weight vector and contain the information about how much the measured signals are combining at the electrodes.

The weights of a Linearly Constrained Minimum Power beamformer (LCMP) are chosen to minimize the output power subject to C H w = f , where C Rnxm is constrained matrix and f Rnx1 is the constrained values vector. In brief description to optimize weight parameters LCMP beamformer designed to min wH Rx w subject to C H w = f where Rx is the covariance matrix of X and weight vector can be expressed as 1 1 w = Rx C(C H RX C)1 f Then the output signal power is
2 Ps = s |wH vs |2

where vs is steering power and s is the signal variance. Also, noise power can be dened as 2 Pn = n |wH n w|2 here n is the noise variance and n is the normalized spatial matrix which contains white noise and interference information. As a result, the gain is Ao = |wH vs |2 |wH n w|

The numerator of the previous equation is unity if a distortionless constraint is included. So, gain became; Ao = |wH n w| and output SN Ro is SN Ro = (
2 s )Ao 2 n

Epilepsy
Brain is the center of the nervous system and it contains more than 100 billion nerve cells. These nerve cells produce electrical activities and transmit information via these electrical activities. Understanding of them provides

Figure 2: Abnormal EEG waveforms in dierent types of epilepsy [22]

us to detect some neurological disorders and communicate with computer without using any muscular function [21]. Electroencephalogram (EEG) is the recording technique for the electrical activity in the brain. In the clinical practice, EEG signals are recorded using several electrodes that are placed various locations on the scalp to analyse activities of the dierent brain regions. These recorded signals are the average action potentials from large number of nerve cells. EEG signals are formed of the rhythmic activities in the brain with dierent frequency bands. It has a very broad range but many important clinical ndings are in 0.5-30 Hz. The main problem for EEG recordings that are very complex and small amplitude signals around 10-100V. Because of this feature of EEG, the recording is aected from all noise and artifacts such as eye blinks, eye movement, cardiac rhythms, muscle activation, poor grounding of electrodes, change in the impedance of electrodes etc. Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that aects 1% of the population. It occurs when neurons discharge synchronisely and the over-stimulation seizure triggers neighbouring regions [23]. The patient can cause to hurt himself or the other people during the epileptic seizure[24]. Some epileptic circumstances can be removed with a surgical operation, to success this the seizure location must be determined perfectly[25]. Determination and classication of epilepsy in a EEG recording has some challanges because of

high non-linearity, high-dimensionality and artifacts. In an epileptic EEG recording there are three states; normal,pre-ictal and ictal. Pre-ictal state is the just before the epileptic seizure begins and ictal state is the state that epileptic seizure is onset. Determination of pre-ictal state is an advantage for clinicians to control the patient but its more challenging than determination of normal and ictal states[19]. In several researches, HOS and beamforming approaches are used to handle this problem before classication operation. In the next section some publications that based on pre-ictal state classication using HOS and beamforming are summarized.

Figure 3: Typical EEG signals (a) normal state (b) preictal state (c) ictal state [19]

Applications
Xia Du et al. classied epilepsy using high-order spectra features and principal component analysis [19]. In this research, before classication algorithm the features of the EEG data were determined using HOS. EEG Data were collected from ve healthy and ve epileptic patients and taken from EEG time series database . Three sets of data (pre-ictal, ictal and normal) were used for this study. The normal EEG data were recorded from healthy subjects and ictal state EEG data was obtained from epileptic patients during the seizure and pre-ictal state EEG data was recorded same patient subjects during the absence of the seizure. The EEG data were recorded using 128-channel amplier system and digitized with a sampling rate 173.61 Hz with 12-bit A/D resolution. After recording the data were ltered using 0.53-40 Hz bandpass lter. To classify the EEG data, 15 dierent HOS based parameters were calculated and these parameters were used as features of classication algorithms. By this method the accuracy of the seizure detection was calculated as 94.5 %. The another classication of epileptic seizure using HOS based feature was published by Chua et al. They used mean of spectral magnitude and entropy 1 and entropy 2, that were dened in HOS section as features. They calculated these features for power spectral density (PSD) and HOS. They compared the feature based classication using Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) classication algorithm. The results shows that classication accuracy of the GMM with HOS features higher than GMM with PSD features. Classes Normal Preictal Ictal Average Percentage of correct classication 87.00 % 84.00 % 95.33 % 88.78 %

Table 2 (a): Classication accuracy of the GMM classier with spectral features (P1 ,P2 ,Mave ) Classes Normal Preictal Ictal Average Percentage of correct classication 92.00 % 89.67 % 97.67 % 93.11 % 9

Table 2 (b): Classication accuracy of the GMM classier with HOS(P1 ,P2 ,Mave ) There is 4% improvement in accuracy when HOS based features were used. The results shows that classication of pre-ictal states more dicult than other states as expected. Lay-Ekuakille et al. studied on beamforming-aided processing of EEG signals for analyzing epileptic seizues [26]. They investigated HOS based feature extraction and used LCMP beamforming to classication. The combination of beamforming and HOS increases the accuracy of the classication algorithm because it accepts EEG electrodes as an array of sensors and adjust the weight parameters. Classes Normal Preictal Ictal Average Percentage of correct classication 91.66 % 93.66 % 98.00 % 94.44 %

Table 3: Accuracy Classication using LCMP As noted from the Table 3, the combination of the HOS and beamforming approaches increase not only classication rates but also increase the performance on determination pre-ictal states according to others.

Conclusion
In this report, we try to explain the performance increment of seizure detection using beamforming and HOS. The researches shows that the feature extraction using HOS increase the performance of classication algorithms no matter which algorithm you used. Because HOS features carry more information than rst order or second order features. Also beamforming approach helps to increase SNR and this satisfy more explicit features for all classes. Beside the increment of SNR, beamforming approach also gives information about the seizure location. The combination of HOS and beamforming satisfy good and accurate classication results, especially in preictal state is very important to prevent the patients hurt himself. As a feature work; we can suggest using independent component analysis (ICA) to remove artifacts and after artifact removing features can be determined using HOS and beamforming. 10

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