The potential of the Lempel–Ziv complexity of the EEG in diagnosing cognitive impairment in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy

AbstractAimTo analyze whether the Lempel–Ziv Complexity (LZC) in quantitative electroencephalogram differs between the temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients with or without cognitive impairment (CI) and explore the diagnostic value of LZC for identifying CI in TLE patients.MethodsTwenty‐two clinical features and 20‐min EEG recordings were collected from 48 TLE patients with CI and 27 cognitively normal (CON) TLE patients. Seventy‐six LZC features were calculated for 19 leads in four frequency bands (alpha, beta, delta, and theta). The clinical and LZC features were compared between the two groups. A support vector machine (SVM) was subsequently constructed using the leave‐one‐out method of cross‐validation for LZC features with statistical differences.ResultsRegarding the clinical features, the level of education (p < .001), hippocampal atrophy and sclerosis (p = .029), and depression (p = .037) were statistically different between the two groups. For the LZC features, there were statistically significant differences in the alpha (Fp1, Fz, Cz, Pz, C3, C4, T3, T4, T5, T6, F3, F4, F7, F8, O1, and O2), beta (Fp2), and theta (F7) oscillations. The mean LZC in the alpha band was higher in the TLE‐CI group than that in the CON group, and there were no differences in the remaining bands. The SVM model showed 74.51% accuracy, 79.63% sensitivity, 84.30% F1 score, 68.75% specificity, and .85 area under the curve scores.ConclusionsThe LZC in the alpha band might have the potential to be used as a biomarker for the diagnosis of TLE combined with CI. The TLE‐CI group, on the other hand, exhibited a higher degree of complexity in alpha oscillations, which were widespread and occurred in all brain regions.