Automatic diagnosis of depression based on attention mechanism and feature pyramid model

PLoS One. 2024 Mar 12;19(3):e0295051. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0295051. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

Currently, most diagnoses of depression are evaluated by medical professionals, with the results of these evaluations influenced by the subjective judgment of physicians. Physiological studies have shown that depressed patients display facial movements, head posture, and gaze direction disorders. To accurately diagnose the degree of depression of patients, this paper proposes a comprehensive framework, Cross-Channel Attentional Depression Detection Network, which can automatically diagnose the degree of depression of patients by inputting information from the facial images of depressed patients. Specifically, the comprehensive framework is composed of three main modules: (1) Face key point detection and cropping for video images based on Multi-Task Convolutional Neural Network. (2) The improved Feature Pyramid Networks model can fuse shallow features and deep features in video images and reduce the loss of miniscule features. (3) A proposed Cross-Channel Attention Convolutional Neural Network can enhance the interaction between tensor channel layers. Compared to other methods for automatic depression identification, a superior method was obtained by conducting extensive experiments on the depression dataset AVEC 2014, where the Root Mean Square Error and the Mean Absolute Error were 8.65 and 6.66, respectively.

MeSH terms

  • Humans
  • Judgment*
  • Movement
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Physicians*
  • Posture

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC): 61672210, the Central Government Guiding Local Science and Technology Development Fund Program of Henan Province in China: Z20221343032, and the Major Science and Technology Program of Henan Province in China: 221100210500. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.