Automated extraction of temporal motor activity signals from video recordings of neonatal seizures based on adaptive block matching

This paper presents an automated procedure developed to extract quantitative information from video recordings of neonatal seizures in the form of motor activity signals. This procedure relies on optical flow computation to select anatomical sites located on the infants´ body parts. Motor activity signals are extracted by tracking selected anatomical sites during the seizure using adaptive block matching. A block of pixels is tracked throughout a sequence of frames by searching for the most similar block of pixels in subsequent frames; this search is facilitated by employing various update strategies to account for the changing appearance of the block. The proposed procedure is used to extract temporal motor activity signals from video recordings of neonatal seizures and other events not associated with seizures.