This paper deals with the event-based finite-time state estimation problem for a class of discrete-time stochastic neural networks with mixed discrete and distributed time delays. In order to mitigate the burden of data communication, a general component-based event-triggered transmission mechanism is proposed to determine whether the measurement output should be released to the estimator at certain time-point according to a specific triggering condition. A new concept of finite-time boundedness in the mean square is put forward to quantify the estimation performance by introducing a settling-like time function. The objective of the addressed problem is to construct an event-based state estimator to estimate the neuron states such that, in the presence of both mixed time delays and external noise disturbances, the dynamics of the estimation error is finite-time bounded in the mean square with a prescribed error upper bound. Sufficient conditions are established, via stochastic analysis techniques, to guarantee the desired estimation performance. By solving an optimization problem with some inequality constraints, the explicit expression of the estimator gain matrix is characterized to minimize the settling-like time. Finally, a numerical simulation example is exploited to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed estimator design scheme.