Epilepsy makes the patients suffer great pain and has a very bad impact on daily life. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to implement electroencephalogram (EEG)-based epilepsy detection, in which multi-frequency multilayer brain network and deep learning are jointly utilized. Firstly, based on the multi-frequency characteristics of brain, we construct a multilayer brain network from the multi-channel EEG signals. The time, frequency and channel-related information from EEG signals are all mapped into the multilayer network topology, making it an effective feature for epilepsy detection. Subsequently, with multilayer brain network as input, a multilayer deep convolutional neural network (MDCNN) model is designed. MDCNN model has two blocks and uses a parallel multi-branch design in the first block, which exactly matches the multilayer structure of the proposed brain network. The experimental results on publicly available CHB-MIT datasets show that the proposed method can accurately detect epilepsy, with a high average accuracy of 99.56%, sensitivity of 99.29%, and specificity of 99.84%. All these provide an efficient solution for characterizing the complex brain states using multi-channel EEG signals.

The study of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals is crucial for understanding brain function and has extensive applications in clinical diagnosis, neuroscience, and brain–computer interface technology. This paper addresses the challenge of recognizing motor imagery EEG signals with few channels, which is essential for portable and real-time applications. A novel framework is proposed that applies a continuous wavelet transform to convert time-domain EEG signals into two-dimensional time-frequency representations. These images are then concatenated into channel-dependent multilayer EEG time-frequency representations (CDML-EEG-TFR), incorporating multidimensional information of time, frequency, and channels, allowing for a more comprehensive and enriched brain representation under the constraint of few channels. By adopting a deep convolutional neural network with EfficientNet as the backbone and utilizing pre-trained weights from natural image datasets for transfer learning, the framework can simultaneously learn temporal, spatial, and channel features embedded in the CDML-EEG-TFR. Moreover, the transfer learning strategy effectively addresses the issue of data sparsity in the context of a few channels. Our approach enhances the classification accuracy of motor imagery EEG signals in few-channel scenarios. Experimental results on the BCI Competition IV 2b dataset show a significant improvement in classification accuracy, reaching 80.21%. This study highlights the potential of CDML-EEG-TFR and the EfficientNet-based transfer learning strategy in few-channel EEG signal classification, laying a foundation for practical applications and further research in medical and sports fields.