AI Could Be a Life-Changer for People with Epilepsy

To forecast seizures, Meisel combines his theories about how seizures happen with deep learning models that detect changes in electrical activity in the brain that signal a seizure. Brain activity data comes from patients wearing an EEG device in which electrodes are placed directly on the surface of the brain. He first tried this approach by entering a seizure-prediction contest on Kaggle, the data science competition platform, while he was a postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He continued the work in his current post, using NVIDIA TITAN X GPUs for training and inference. In both experiments, his algorithm accurately forecasted seizures with a score of 0.8 – better than flipping a coin, which scores 0.5  – but not quite a perfect prediction of 1.