Abstract
EEG phase-amplitude coupling (PAC), the amplitude of high-frequency oscillations modulated by the phase of low-frequency oscillations (LFOs), is a useful biomarker to localize epileptogenic tissue. It is commonly represented in a comodulogram of coupling strength but without coupled phase information. The phase-amplitude coupling is also found in the normal brain, and it is difficult to discriminate pathological phase-amplitude couplings from normal ones. This study proposes a novel approach based on complex-valued phase-amplitude coupling (CV-PAC) for classifying epileptic phase-amplitude coupling. The CV-PAC combines both the coupling strengths and the coupled phases of low-frequency oscillations. The complex-valued convolutional neural network (CV-CNN) is then used to classify epileptic CV-PAC. Stereo-electroencephalography (SEEG) recordings from nine intractable epilepsy patients were analyzed. The leave-one-out cross-validation is performed, and the area-under-curve (AUC) value is used as the indicator of the performance of different measures. Our result shows that the area-under-curve value is .92 for classifying epileptic CV-PAC using CV-CNN. The area-under-curve value decreases to .89, .80, and .88 while using traditional convolutional neural networks, support vector machine, and random forest, respectively. The phases of delta (1-4 Hz) and alpha (8-10 Hz) bands are different between epileptic and normal CV-PAC. The phase information of CV-PAC is important for improving classification performance. The proposed approach of CV-PAC/CV-CNN promises to identify more accurate epileptic brain activities for potential surgical intervention.