Work place: University of Sfax, Miracl Lab, Digital Research Center of Sfax, CRNS, Higher Business School, Sfax, Tunisia
E-mail: naweljmail@yahoo.fr
Website:
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Biography
Nawel Jmail is an Associate Professor of Signal Processing and a Senior Researcher at the MIRACL Laboratory, University of Sfax, Tunisia. She holds an Engineering degree from National School of Engineers of Sfax, ENIS and a PhD in Neurosciences, conducted in co-tutelle between Aix-Marseille University (France) and the University of Sfax. Having obtained her Habilitation (HDR), she is a leading expert in electrophysiological signal analysis (MEG, EEG, and IEEG). Her research focuses on brain source localization, functional connectivity, and the development of automated biomarkers for epilepsy, including High-frequency Oscillations (HFOs). Dr. Jmail has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles in prestigious journals and maintains strong international collaborations with institutions such as INSERM.
By Rahma Maalej Abir Hadriche Mohamed Amine Ben Msarra Nawel Jmail
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijigsp.2026.03.01, Pub. Date: 8 Jun. 2026
Interictal high-frequency oscillations, including ripples in the frequency range of 80-250 hertz and fast ripples between 250-500 hertz, are increasingly recognized as reliable electrophysiological biomarkers for delineating the epileptogenic zone in patients with drug-resistant epilepsy. However, their routine clinical exploitation remains limited due to pronounced morphological variability, low signal-to-noise ratios, and the difficulty of identifying overlapping events in which ripples and fast ripples occur simultaneously.
This paper presents an automated deep learning framework designed for the multi-label classification of pathological high-frequency oscillations in intracranial electroencephalographic signals. The proposed approach integrates advanced nonlinear statistical descriptors, including entropy- and complexity-based measures, in order to enhance the discriminative representation of the signals. These features are processed using a hybrid deep learning architecture that combines convolutional neural networks for local morphological feature extraction with bidirectional long short-term memory networks to capture long-range temporal dependencies in non-stationary neural signals.
The proposed framework was evaluated using the publicly available multi-patient intracranial electroencephalography dataset provided by the Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience initiative. Experimental results demonstrate a classification accuracy of 98.3 %, along with high precision and balanced performance across all pathological classes. These findings indicate that the proposed method offers a robust and objective solution for the automated identification of high-frequency oscillations, with strong potential for improving presurgical evaluation and decision-making in epilepsy surgery.
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