HybridEEGNet: A Convolutional Neural Network for EEG Feature Learning and Depression Discrimination

Electroencephalogram (EEG) measurement, being an appropriate approach to understanding the underlying mechanisms of the major depressive disorder (MDD), is used to discriminate between depressive and normal control. With the advancement of deep learning methods, many studies have designed deep learning models to improve the classification accuracy of depression discrimination. However, few of them have focused on designing a convolutional filter to learn features according to EEG activity characteristics. In this study, a novel convolutional neural network named HybridEEGNet that is composed of two parallel lines is proposed to learn the synchronous and regional EEG features, and further differentiate normal controls from medicated and unmedicated MDD patients. A ten-fold cross validation method is used to train and test the model. The results show that HybridEEGNet achieves a sensitivity of 68.78%, a specificity of 84.45%, and an accuracy of 79.08% in three-category classification. The result of EEG feature analysis indicates that the differences of spatial distributions and amplitude ranges in the alpha rhythm (especially at approximately 10 Hz) among three categories might be distinctive attributes for depression discrimination.