SeizureTransformer: Scaling U-Net with Transformer for Simultaneous Time-Step Level Seizure Detection from Long EEG Recordings

Abstract: Epilepsy is a common neurological disorder that affects around 65 million people worldwide. Detecting seizures quickly and accurately is vital, given the prevalence and severity of the associated complications. Recently, deep learning-based automated seizure detection methods have emerged as solutions; however, most existing methods require extensive post-processing and do not effectively handle the crucial long-range patterns in EEG data. In this work, we propose SeizureTransformer, a simple model comprised of (i) a deep encoder comprising 1D convolutions (ii) a residual CNN stack and a transformer encoder to embed previous output into high-level representation with contextual information, and (iii) streamlined decoder which converts these features into a sequence of probabilities, directly indicating the presence or absence of seizures at every time step. Extensive experiments on public and private EEG seizure detection datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms existing approaches (ranked in the first place in the 2025 "seizure detection challenge" organized in the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Epilepsy and Other Neurological Disorders), underscoring its potential for real-time, precise seizure detection.