Syntactic analysis of the epileptic electroencephalogram.

A full-scale scheme of the multi-level syntactic analysis of the epileptic EEG is presented and discussed in detail. An exhaustive description of basic procedures necessary to obtain a meaningful description of any set of epileptic EEG recordings is given; these procedures include algorithms for extraction of various elementary peaks from the EEG signal, for segmentation of the recording, for classification of the segments found into distinct groups of characteristic patterns and, finally, for calculation of the Levenshtein distance between the individual recordings, each recording regarded as a string of symbols taken to represent different classes of patterns. An example of global analysis in terms of such a distance, performed on a typical set of epileptic EEG recordings, is supplied to prove the feasibility of the scheme proposed.