Crowdsourcing contest to predict epileptic seizures

The world’s keenest data scientists are invited to take part in a competition to predict seizures, using data from patients that has never before been available to researchers. The contest is being run by the University of Melbourne, in conjunction with the American Epilepsy Society, the National Institutes of Health and MathWorks, and will be hosted on predictive modelling platform Kaggle.

Participants will be working with long-term electrical brain activity recordings from humans obtained from a clinical trial of the Seizure Advisory System — an implantable device developed by Seattle-based start-up NeuroVista. The challenge is to distinguish between 10-minute data clips covering an hour prior to a seizure and 10-minute intracranial EEG (iEEG) clips of interictal activity.

“The end game is to be able to warn patients of an impending seizure or activate an implantable device that stops seizures,” said lead organiser Dr Levin Kuhlmann from the University of Melbourne.

“This will help alleviate the stress of not knowing when a seizure will occur and greatly improve the quality of life of people with epilepsy.”

What makes the competition especially exciting is that teams will crunch human brainwave data spanning six months to three years. As noted by the University of Melbourne’s Professor David Grayden, researchers have so far only been able to work on data taken over a period of two weeks — when people with epilepsy go into hospital.

“That’s typically allowed access to data from up to 10 seizures,” Professor Grayden said. “We can now offer data on dozens of seizures measured over a longer period.

“This is the only dataset with an adequate amount of data to accurately evaluate seizure prediction algorithms in humans.”

Teams participating in the contest have until 21 November to pore over 60 GB of data, taking in intervals both before and between seizures. The winners will receive up to US$20,000 in prize money and have their findings presented at the next American Epilepsy Society annual meeting in December.

For more information on the competition, visit https://www.kaggle.com/c/melbourne-university-seizure-prediction.