Enhanced Performance by Interpretable Low-Frequency Electroencephalogram Oscillations in the Machine Learning-Based Diagnosis of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Miseon Shim; Chang-Hwan Im; Seung-Hwan Lee; Han-Jeong Hwang

doi:10.3389/fninf.2022.811756

Enhanced Performance by Interpretable Low-Frequency Electroencephalogram Oscillations in the Machine Learning-Based Diagnosis of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Front Neuroinform. 2022 Apr 26:16:811756. doi: 10.3389/fninf.2022.811756. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Miseon Shim^{1

2}, Chang-Hwan Im³, Seung-Hwan Lee^{4

5}, Han-Jeong Hwang^{1

6}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electronics and Information, Korea University, Sejong, South Korea.
² Industry Development Institute, Korea University, Sejong, South Korea.
³ Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea.
⁴ Department of Psychiatry, Ilsan Paik Hospital, Inje University, Goyang, South Korea.
⁵ Clinical Emotion and Cognition Research Laboratory, Goyang, South Korea.
⁶ Interdisciplinary Graduate Program for Artificial Intelligence Smart Convergence Technology, Korea University, Sejong, South Korea.

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based diagnosis of psychiatric diseases using machine-learning approaches has made possible the objective diagnosis of various psychiatric diseases. The objective of this study was to improve the performance of a resting-state EEG-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), by optimizing the frequency bands used to extract EEG features. We used eyes-closed resting-state EEG data recorded from 77 PTSD patients and 58 healthy controls (HC). Source-level power spectrum densities (PSDs) of the resting-state EEG data were extracted from 6 frequency bands (delta, theta, alpha, low-beta, high-beta, and gamma), and the PSD features of each frequency band and their combinations were independently used to discriminate PTSD and HC. The classification performance was evaluated using support vector machine with leave-one-out cross validation. The PSD features extracted from slower-frequency bands (delta and theta) showed significantly higher classification performance than those of relatively higher-frequency bands. The best classification performance was achieved when using delta PSD features (86.61%), which was significantly higher than that reported in a recent study by about 13%. The PSD features selected to obtain better classification performances could be explained from a neurophysiological point of view, demonstrating the promising potential to develop a clinically reliable EEG-based CAD system for PTSD diagnosis.

Keywords: classification; computer-aided diagnosis; machine-learning technique; post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); resting-state electroencephalogram (EEG); slow-frequency EEG oscillation.