Efficient EEG Seizure Detection Using INT8 Quantization, Channel Pruning, and Spiking Neural Networks

Abstract

Continuous EEG monitoring for epilepsy is constrained by the limited power and memory budgets of wearable and implantable devices. Deep neural networks can detect seizures with high accuracy, but their computational cost and model size make them difficult to deploy on such platforms. In this work we use a single 1D CNN seizure detector on the CHB-MIT scalp EEG dataset as a common baseline, and then investigate three brain-inspired efficiency strategies: (i) conversion of the CNN into a spiking neural network (SNN) via parameter transfer, (ii) EEG channel pruning combined with 2:4 structured weight sparsity, and (iii) INT8 quantization using FX- and ONNX-based workflows, including quantization-aware training and operator fusion. The quantized CNN variants reduce stored model size from 1.63 MB to 0.44 MB, lower estimated energy per inference by up to 64%, and achieve as much as 2.8 times speedup in CPU latency while preserving, and in one case slightly improving, AUC. The pruned CNN halves the number of input channels and non-zero weights with only a modest accuracy drop, and the SNN conversion provides a spiking implementation with sparse temporal activity. Together, these experiments characterize three complementary efficiency directions for seizure detection.