Early identification of mental disorders, based on subjective interviews, is extremely challenging in the clinical setting. There is a growing interest in developing automated screening tools for potential mental health problems based on biological markers. Here, we demonstrate the feasibility of an AI-powered diagnosis of different mental disorders using EEG data. Specifically, this work aims to classify different mental disorders in the following ecological context accurately: (1) using raw EEG data, (2) collected during rest, (3) during both eye open, and eye closed conditions, (4) at short 2-min duration, (5) on participants with different psychiatric conditions, (6) with some overlapping symptoms, and (7) with strongly imbalanced classes. To tackle this challenge, we designed and optimized a transformer-based architecture, where class imbalance is addressed through focal loss and class weight balancing. Using the recently released TDBRAIN dataset (n= 1274 participants), our method classifies each participant as either a neurotypical or suffering from major depressive disorder (MDD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), subjective memory complaints (SMC), or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). We evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture on both the window-level and the patient-level. The classification of the 2-min raw EEG data into five classes achieved a window-level accuracy of 63.2% and 65.8% for open and closed eye conditions, respectively. When the classification is limited to three main classes (MDD, ADHD, SMC), window level accuracy improved to 75.1% and 69.9% for eye open and eye closed conditions, respectively. Our work paves the way for developing novel AI-based methods for accurately diagnosing mental disorders using raw resting-state EEG data.
Keywords: Class Imbalance; EEG Classification; Multivariate Time-series Classification; Psychiatric Dysfunction; Transformer Networks.
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