Medical Applications of EEG Wave
Classification
Wanli Min and Gang Luo

Medical Background

D

id you know your brain continuously emits electric waves, even while you sleep? Based on a sample of wave measurements, physicians specializing in sleep medicine can use statistical tools to classify your sleep pattern as normal or problematic.
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) now being developed can classify a disabled person’s thinking based on wave measurements and automatically execute necessary instructions.
This type of research is exciting, but conducting it requires knowledge of medicine, biology, statistics, physics, and computer science.
Electroencephalogram (EEG) is the recording of electrical activity through electrode sensors placed on the scalp. The electricity is recorded as waves that can be classified as normal or abnormal. Measuring EEG signals is not an intrusive procedure; it causes no pain and has been used routinely for several decades.
Different types of normal waves can indicate various states or activity levels. Abnormal waves can indicate medical problems. Two important applications of EEG wave classification are diagnosis of sleep disorders and construction of BCIs to assist disabled people with daily living tasks.

Sleep, which takes up roughly one-third of a person’s life, is indispensable for health and well-being. Nevertheless, onethird of Americans suffer from a sleep problem. For example, one in five American adults has some degree of sleep apnea, which is a disorder characterized by pauses of 10 seconds or longer in breathing during sleep. A person with sleep apnea cannot self-diagnose the disorder. To make diagnoses for sleep disorders, physicians usually need to record patients’ sleep patterns.
A typical sleep recording has multiple channels of EEG waves coming from the electrodes placed on the