Electroencephalogram Spectral Moments for the Detection of Nocturnal Hypoglycemia

Abstract—Hypoglycemia or low blood glucose is the most feared complication of insulin treatment of diabetes. For people with diabetes, the mismatch between the insulin therapy and the body’s physiology could increase the risk of hypoglycemia. Nocturnal hypoglycemia is particularly dangerous for type-1 diabetes patients because its symptoms may obscure during sleep. The early onset detection of hypoglycemia at night time is necessary because it can result in unconsciousness and even death. This paper presents new electroencephalogram spectral features for nocturnal hypoglycemia detection. The system uses high-order spectral moments for feature extraction and Bayesian neural network for classification. From a clinical study of hypoglycemia of eight patients with type-1 diabetes at night, we find that these spectral moments of theta band and alpha band changed significantly. During hypoglycemia episodes, the theta moments increased significantly (P < 0.001) while the features of alpha band reduced significantly (P< 0.001). Using the optimal Bayesian neural network, the classification results were 85% and 52% in sensitivity and specificity, respectively. The significant correlation (P<0.001) with real blood glucose profiles shows the effectiveness of the proposed features for the detection of nocturnal hypoglycemia. Index Terms—Bayesian neural network, electroencephalogram (EEG), hypoglycemia, spectral moment