Identification and Classification of Pathology and Artifacts for Human Intracranial Cognitive Research

Intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) presents a unique opportunity to extend human neuroscientific understanding. However, typically iEEG is collected from patients diagnosed with focal drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE) and contains transient bursts of pathological activity. This activity disrupts performances on cognitive tasks and can distort findings from human neurophysiology studies. In addition to manual marking by a trained expert, numerous IED detectors have been developed to identify these pathological events. Even so, the versatility and usefulness of these detectors is limited by training on small datasets, incomplete performance metrics, and lack of generalizability to iEEG. Here, we employed a large annotated public iEEG dataset from two institutions to train a random forest classifier (RFC) to distinguish data segments as either 'non-cerebral artifact' (n = 73,902), 'pathological activity' (n = 67,797), or 'physiological activity' (n = 151,290). We found our model performed with an accuracy of 0.941, specificity of 0.950, sensitivity of 0.908, precision of 0.911, and F1 score of 0.910, averaged across all three event types. We extended the generalizability of our model to continuous bipolar data collected in a task-state at a different institution with a lower sampling rate and found our model performed with an accuracy of 0.789, specificity of 0.806, and sensitivity of 0.742, averaged across all three event types. Additionally, we created a custom graphical user interface to implement our classifier and enhance usability.