fNIRS-Driven Depression Recognition Based on Cross-Modal Data Augmentation

Early diagnosis and intervention of depression promote complete recovery, with its traditional clinical assessments depending on the diagnostic scales, clinical experience of doctors and patient cooperation. Recent researches indicate that functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) based on deep learning provides a promising approach to depression diagnosis. However, collecting large fNIRS datasets within a standard experimental paradigm remains challenging, limiting the applications of deep networks that require more data. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose an fNIRS-driven depression recognition architecture based on cross-modal data augmentation (fCMDA), which converts fNIRS data into pseudo-sequence activation images. The approach incorporates a time-domain augmentation mechanism, including time warping and time masking, to generate diverse data. Additionally, we design a stimulation task-driven data pseudo-sequence method to map fNIRS data into pseudo-sequence activation images, facilitating the extraction of spatial-temporal, contextual and dynamic characteristics. Ultimately, we construct a depression recognition model based on deep classification networks using the imbalance loss function. Extensive experiments are performed on the two-class depression diagnosis and five-class depression severity recognition, which reveal impressive results with accuracy of 0.905 and 0.889, respectively. The fCMDA architecture provides a novel solution for effective depression recognition with limited data.