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The daily experience of mental stress profoundly influences our health and work performance while concurrently triggering alterations in brain electrical activity. Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a widely adopted method for assessing cognitive and affective states. This study delves into the EEG correlates of stress and the potential use of resting EEG in evaluating stress levels. Over 13 weeks, our longitudinal study focuses on the real-life experiences of college students, collecting data from each of the 18 participants across multiple days in classroom settings. To tackle the complexity arising from the multitude of EEG features and the imbalance in data samples across stress levels, we use the sequential backward selection (SBS) method for feature selection and the adaptive synthetic (ADASYN) sampling algorithm for imbalanced data. Our findings unveil that delta and theta features account for approximately 50% of the selected features through the SBS process. In leave-one-out (LOO) cross-validation, the combination of band power and pair-wise coherence (COH) achieves a maximum balanced accuracy of 94.8% in stress-level detection for the above daily stress dataset. Notably, using ADASYN and borderline synthesized minority over-sampling technique (borderline-SMOTE) methods enhances model accuracy compared to the traditional SMOTE approach. These results provide valuable insights into using EEG signals for assessing stress levels in real-life scenarios, shedding light on potential strategies for managing stress more effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic identification of visual learning style in real time using raw electroencephalogram (EEG) is challenging. In this work, inspired by the powerful abilities of deep learning techniques, deep learning-based models are proposed to learn high-level feature representation for EEG visual learning identification. Existing computer-aided systems that use electroencephalograms and machine learning can reasonably assess learning styles. Despite their potential, offline processing is often necessary to eliminate artifacts and extract features, making these methods unsuitable for real-time applications. The dataset was chosen with 34 healthy subjects to measure their EEG signals during resting states (eyes open and eyes closed) and while performing learning tasks. The subjects displayed no prior knowledge of the animated educational content presented in video format. The paper presents an analysis of EEG signals measured during a resting state with closed eyes using three deep learning techniques: Long-term, short-term memory (LSTM), Long-term, short-term memory–convolutional neural network (LSTM-CNN), and Long-term, short-term memory–Fully convolutional neural network (LSTM-FCNN). The chosen techniques were based on their suitability for real-time applications with varying data lengths and the need for less computational time. The optimization of hypertuning parameters has enabled the identification of visual learners through the implementation of three techniques. LSTM-CNN technique has the highest average accuracy of 94%, a sensitivity of 80%, a specificity of 92%, and an F1 score of 94% when identifying the visual learning style of the student out of all three techniques. This research has shown that the most effective method is the deep learning-based LSTM-CNN technique, which accurately identifies a student’s visual learning style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based motor imagery (MI) is one of brain computer interface (BCI) paradigms, which aims to build a direct communication pathway between human brain and external devices by decoding the brain activities. In a traditional way, MI BCI replies on a single brain, which suffers from the limitations, such as low accuracy and weak stability. To alleviate these limitations, multi-brain BCI has emerged based on the integration of multiple individuals’ intelligence. Nevertheless, the existing decoding methods mainly use linear averaging or feature integration learning from multi-brain EEG data, and do not effectively utilize coupling relationship features, resulting in undesired decoding accuracy. To overcome these challenges, we proposed an EEG-based multi-brain MI decoding method, which utilizes coupling feature extraction and few-shot learning to capture coupling relationship features among multi-brains with only limited EEG data. We performed an experiment to collect EEG data from multiple persons who engaged in the same task simultaneously and compared the methods on the collected data. The comparison results showed that our proposed method improved the performance by 14.23% compared to the single-brain mode in the 10-shot three-class decoding task. It demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method and usability of the method in the context of only small amount of EEG data available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN)-based classification models have shown good performance for motor imagery (MI) brain-computer interfaces (BCI) using electroencephalogram (EEG) in end-to-end learning. Although a few explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques have been developed, it is still challenging to interpret the CNN models for EEG-based BCI classification effectively. In this research, we propose 3D-EEGNet as a 3D CNN model to improve both the explainability and performance of MI EEG classification. The proposed approach exhibited better performances on two MI EEG datasets than the existing EEGNet, which uses a 2D input shape. The MI classification accuracies are improved around 1.8% and 6.1% point in average on the datasets, respectively. The permutation-based XAI method is first applied for the reliable explanation of the 3D-EEGNet. Next, to find a faster XAI method for spatio-temporal explanation, we design a novel technique based on the normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG) for selecting the best among a few saliency-based methods due to their higher time complexity than the permutation-based method. Among the saliency-based methods, DeepLIFT was selected because the NDCG scores indicated its results are the most similar to the permutation-based results. Finally, the fast spatio-temporal explanation using DeepLIFT provides deeper understanding for the classification results of the 3D-EEGNet and the important properties in the MI EEG experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous electroencephalogram (EEG) emotion recognition relies on single-task learning, which may lead to overfitting and learned emotion features lacking generalization. In this paper, a graph-based multi-task self-supervised learning model (GMSS) for EEG emotion recognition is proposed. GMSS has the ability to learn more general representations by integrating multiple self-supervised tasks, including spatial and frequency jigsaw puzzle tasks, and contrastive learning tasks. By learning from multiple tasks simultaneously, GMSS can find a representation that captures all of the tasks thereby decreasing the chance of overfitting on the original task, i.e., emotion recognition task. In particular, the spatial jigsaw puzzle task aims to capture the intrinsic spatial relationships of different brain regions. Considering the importance of frequency information in EEG emotional signals, the goal of the frequency jigsaw puzzle task is to explore the crucial frequency bands for EEG emotion recognition. To further regularize the learned features and encourage the network to learn inherent representations, contrastive learning task is adopted in this work by mapping the transformed data into a common feature space. The performance of the proposed GMSS is compared with several popular unsupervised and supervised methods. Experiments on SEED, SEED-IV, and MPED datasets show that the proposed model has remarkable advantages in learning more discriminative and general features for EEG emotional signals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Epilepsy seizure (ES) monitoring and detection are only two examples of the many problems that may be addressed by combining the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) with machine learning (ML) techniques and cloud computing services. Epilepsy, a potentially fatal neurological disorder, is a worldwide problem that poses a significant threat to human health. There is an urgent need for a reliable way of identifying epileptic seizures in their early stages to save thousands of epileptic patients every year. With the use of IoMT, several medical treatments, such as epileptic monitoring, diagnosis, and other procedures, may be performed remotely, hence lowering healthcare costs and enhancing service quality. EEG datasets have made use of feature importance-based data reduction to address the problem of a high number of data points and improve the delivery of service to the end user. In this article, we use the feature importance method by applying two popular machine learning techniques extra tree classifier (ETC) and the extreme gradient boosting classifier (XGBoost). Finally, the performance of a number of tests is evaluated using experimental data from Bonn University. Also achieved is a comparison of the two approaches used. The collected findings demonstrate the efficacy of the XGBoost technique and its greater accuracy in comparison to the ETC strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recording and measurement of the electric events of the brain utilizing an electroencephalogram (EEG) has turned out to be a prominent equipment among the plethora of devices used for the analysis of neural ailments in the previous few years, especially for seizure detection. It is condemnatory to ascertain if the state of an epilepsy patient's brain is symptomatic of a plausible seizure beginning; hence, EEG signals aid with the provision of significant information regarding the epileptogenic networks which is meant to be scrutinized and comprehended prior the commencement of therapeutic proceedings. And so relevant alarm or treatment could be provided in time. Desirable seizure prognosis depends on the ability to appropriately distinguish the preictal phase from the interictal phase of ictal in EEG. The pre-programmed seizure indication system can efficiently aid physicians to diagnose and proctor epilepsy which also decreases their amount of work. Various different remarkable studies are found to give great outcomes in the complication two-class seizure diagnosis, but the majority of the feature extraction techniques are contingent on manual techniques. This work nominates a start to end seizure indication structure that is automatic and whose methodology is grounded on deep learning. To achieve this, EEG signals from CHB-MIT Scalp EEG database. The Deep convolutional variational autoencoder (DCVAE) was utilized to study the expressed seizure features from EEG data and The tunable Q-factor wavelet transform (TQWT) was utilized for pre-processing. Later, these vigorous EEG characteristics relevant to seizures are provided as the input to the stacked bi-directional long short-term memory (SB-LSTM) model for the automatic detection of epileptic seizures. One of the best models, achieved an accuracy of 99.6%, sensitivity of 98.85%, and specificity values of 99.8%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sleep data are typically characterized by class imbalance, which can cause the model to be overly biased toward frequent classes, resulting in low accuracy of minority class classification. However, the minority class of sleep staging has important value in diagnosing certain disorders, such as an N1 Stage that is too short indicating possible hypersomnia or narcolepsy. To address this problem, we propose a multi-view CNN model based on adaptive margin-aware loss. A novel margin-aware factor that considers the relative sample sizes of both frequent and minority classes can improve the overfitting of minority classes by increasing the regularization strength of minority classes without changing the sample size to maximize the decision margins of minority classes. On this basis, we propose margin-aware cross-entropy and margin-aware complement entropy loss, respectively. Margin-aware complement entropy can be achieved to increase the regularization for minority classes while neutralizing errors for minority classes, thus improving the classification accuracy for minority classes. Finally, the synergy of margin-aware complement entropy and cross-entropy is realized in an adaptive way to improve the sleep staging classification accuracy. We tested on three sleep datasets and compared them with the state-of-the-art, and the results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm not only improves the accuracy of sleep staging in general, but also improves the minority classes to a greater extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we present a new Deep Learning (DL) architecture for Motor Imagery (MI) based Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) called EEGSym. Our implementation aims to improve previous state-of-the-art performances on MI classification by overcoming inter-subject variability and reducing BCI inefficiency, which has been estimated to affect 10-50% of the population. This convolutional neural network includes the use of inception modules, residual connections and a design that introduces the symmetry of the brain through the mid-sagittal plane into the network architecture. It is complemented with a data augmentation technique that improves the generalization of the model and with the use of transfer learning across different datasets. We compare EEGSym’s performance on inter-subject MI classification with ShallowConvNet, DeepConvNet, EEGNet and EEG-Inception. This comparison is performed on 5 publicly available datasets that include left or right hand motor imagery of 280 subjects. This population is the largest that has been evaluated in similar studies to date. EEGSym significantly outperforms the baseline models reaching accuracies of 88.6±9.0 on Physionet, 83.3±9.3 on OpenBMI, 85.1±9.5 on Kaya2018, 87.4±8.0 on Meng2019 and 90.2±6.5 on Stieger2021. At the same time, it allows 95.7% of the tested population (268 out of 280 users) to reach BCI control (≥70% accuracy). Furthermore, these results are achieved using only 16 electrodes of the more than 60 available on some datasets. Our implementation of EEGSym, which includes new advances for EEG processing with DL, outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches on inter-subject MI classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brain-computer interface (BCI) is a useful device for people without relying on peripheral nerves and muscles. However, the performance of the event-related potential (ERP)-based BCI declines when applying it to real environments, especially in cross-state and cross-subject conditions. Here we employ temporal modeling and adversarial training to improve the visual ERP-based BCI under different mental workload states and to alleviate the problems above. The rationality of our method is that the ERP-based BCI is based on electroencephalography (EEG) signals recorded from the scalp’s surface, continuously changing with time and somewhat stochastic. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical recurrent network to encode all ERP signals in each repetition at the same time and model them with a temporal manner to predict which visual event elicited an ERP. The hierarchical architecture is a simple yet effective method for organizing recurrent layers in a deep structure to model long sequence signals. Taking a cue from recent advances in adversarial training, we further applied dynamic adversarial perturbations to create adversarial examples to enhance the model performance. We conduct our experiments on one published visual ERP-based BCI task with 15 subjects and 3 different auditory workload states. The results indicate that our hierarchical method can effectively model the long sequence EEG raw data, outperform the baselines on most conditions, including cross-state and cross-subject conditions. Finally, we show how deep learning-based methods with limited EEG data can improve ERP-based BCI with adversarial training. Our code is available at https://github.com/aispeech-lab/VisBCI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicting attention-modulated brain responses is a major area of investigation in brain–computer interface (BCI) research that aims to translate neural activities into useful control and communication commands. Such studies involve collecting electroencephalographic (EEG) data from subjects to train classifiers for decoding users’ mental states. However, various sources of inter or intrasubject variabilities in brain signals render training classifiers in BCI systems challenging. From a machine learning perspective, this model training generally follows a common methodology: 1) apply some type of feature extraction, which can be time-consuming and may require domain knowledge and 2) train a classifier using extracted features. The advent of deep learning technologies has offered unprecedented opportunities to not only construct remarkably accurate classifiers but also to integrate the feature extraction stage into the classifier construction. Although integrating feature extraction, which is generally domain-dependent, into the classifier construction is a considerable advantage of deep learning models, the process of architecture selection for BCIs generally depends on domain knowledge. In this study, we examine the feasibility of conducting a systematic model selection combined with mainstream deep learning architectures to construct accurate classifiers for decoding P300 event-related potentials. In particular, we present the results of 232 convolutional neural networks (CNNs) (4 datasets $\times58$ structures), 36 long short-term memory cells (LSTMs) (4 datasets $\times9$ structures), and 320 hybrid CNN-LSTM models (4 datasets $\times80$ structures) of varying complexity. Our empirical results show that in the classification of P300 waveforms, the constructed predictive models can outperform the current state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, which are partially or entirely inspired by domain knowledge. The source codes and constructed models are available at https://github.com/berdakh/P3Net. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is the most prevalent neurodevelopmental disorder among children. It affects patients’ lives in many ways: inattention, difficulty with stimuli inhibition or motor function regulation. Different treatments exist today, but these can present side effects or are not effective for all subgroups. Neurofeedback (NF) is an innovative treatment consisting of brain activity display. NF training could consist of a virtual reality (VR) video-game in which the participant’s attention affects the game. Attention being assessed through physiological signals, one of the main steps is to design an estimator for the attention state. We present a novel framework able to record physiological signals in specific attention states and able to estimate the corresponding attention state. We propose a database composed of electroencephalography signals (EEG), and an eye-tracker labelled with a score representing the attention span for 32 healthy participants. Different features are extracted from the signals and machine learning (ML) algorithms are proposed. Our approach exhibits high accuracy for attention estimation, which corroborates a correlation between attention state and physiological signals (i.e. EEG, eye-tracking signals). The dataset has been made publicly available to promote research in the domain and we encourage other scientists to use their own approach for attention estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electroencephalogram (EEG) decoding aims to identify the perceptual, semantic, and cognitive content of neural processing based on noninvasively measured brain activity. Traditional EEG decoding methods have achieved moderate success when applied to data acquired in static, well-controlled lab environments. However, an open-world environment is a more realistic setting, where situations affecting EEG recordings can emerge unexpectedly, significantly weakening the robustness of existing methods. In recent years, deep learning (DL) has emerged as a potential solution for such problems due to its superior capacity in feature extraction. It overcomes the limitations of defining handcrafted features or features extracted using shallow architectures but typically requires large amounts of costly, expertly labeled data, something not always obtainable. Combining DL with domain-specific knowledge may allow for the development of robust approaches that decode brain activity even with small-sample data. Although various DL techniques have been proposed to tackle some of the challenges in EEG decoding, a systematic tutorial overview, particularly for open-world applications, is currently lacking. This article therefore provides a comprehensive survey of DL methods for open-world EEG decoding and identifies promising research directions to inspire future studies for EEG decoding in real-world applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims at assessing the usefulness of deep learning to enhance the diagnostic ability of oximetry in the context of automated detection of pediatric obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). A total of 3196 blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) signals from children were used for this purpose. A convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture was trained using 20-min SpO2 segments from the training set (859 subjects) to estimate the number of apneic events. CNN hyperparameters were tuned using Bayesian optimization in the validation set (1402 subjects). This model was applied to three test sets composed of 312, 392, and 231 subjects from three independent databases, in which the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) estimated for each subject (AHICNN) was obtained by aggregating the output of the CNN for each 20-min SpO2 segment. AHICNN outperformed the 3% oxygen desaturation index (ODI3), a clinical approach, as well as the AHI estimated by a conventional feature-engineering approach based on multi-layer perceptron (AHIMLP). Specifically, AHICNN reached higher four-class Cohen's kappa in the three test databases than ODI3 (0.515 vs 0.417, 0.422 vs 0.372, and 0.423 vs 0.369) and AHIMLP (0.515 vs 0.377, 0.422 vs 0.381, and 0.423 vs 0.306). In addition, our proposal outperformed state-of-the-art studies, particularly for the AHI severity cutoffs of 5 e/h and 10 e/h. This suggests that the information automatically learned from the SpO2 signal by deep-learning techniques helps to enhance the diagnostic ability of oximetry in the context of pediatric OSA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The common spatial patterns (CSP) algorithm is the most popular spatial filtering method applied to extract electroencephalogram (EEG) features for motor imagery (MI) based brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. The effectiveness of the CSP algorithm depends on optimal selection of the frequency band and time window from the EEG. Many algorithms have been designed to optimize frequency band selection for CSP, while few algorithms seek to optimize the time window. This study proposes a novel framework, termed common time-frequency-spatial patterns (CTFSP), to extract sparse CSP features from multi-band filtered EEG data in multiple time windows. Specifically, the whole MI period is first segmented into multiple subseries using a sliding time window approach. Then, sparse CSP features are extracted from multiple frequency bands in each time window. Finally, multiple support vector machine (SVM) classifiers with the Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel are trained to identify the MI tasks and the voting result of these classifiers determines the final output of the BCI. This study applies the proposed CTFSP algorithm to three public EEG datasets (BCI competition III dataset IVa, BCI competition III dataset IIIa, and BCI competition IV dataset 1) to validate its effectiveness, compared against several other state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is a promising candidate for improving the performance of MI-BCI systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classification of electroencephalogram-based motor imagery (MI-EEG) tasks raises a big challenge in the design and development of brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). In view of the characteristics of nonstationarity, time-variability, and individual diversity of EEG signals, a deep learning framework termed SSD-SE-convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed for MI-EEG classification. The framework consists of three parts: 1) the sparse spectrotemporal decomposition (SSD) algorithm is proposed for feature extraction, overcoming the drawbacks of conventional time–frequency analysis methods and enhancing the robustness to noise; 2) a CNN is constructed to fully exploit the time–frequency features, thus outperforming traditional classification methods both in terms of accuracy and kappa value; and 3) the squeeze-and-excitation (SE) blocks are adopted to adaptively recalibrate channelwise feature responses, which further improves the overall performance and offers a compelling classification solution for MI-EEG applications. Experimental results on two datasets reveal that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both classification quality and robustness. The advantages of SSD-SE-CNN include high accuracy, high efficiency, and robustness to cross-trial and cross-session variations, making it an ideal candidate for long-term MI-EEG applications. Note to Practitioners—Motor imagery-based brain–computer interfaces (MI-BCIs) are widely used to allow a user to control a device using only his or her neural activity. This article proposed a new framework to classify two-class MI tasks based on electroencephalography (EEG) signals. In this framework, a new sparse spectrotemporal decomposition method is used to extract time–frequency features from EEG signals. A convolutional neural network with squeeze-and-excitation blocks is then constructed to classify the MI tasks. We show the superiority of our method on two datasets and prove its feasibility for long-term MI-BCI applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotion is a crucial aspect of human health, and emotion recognition systems serve important roles in the development of neurofeedback applications. Most of the emotion recognition methods proposed in previous research take predefined EEG features as input to the classification algorithms. This paper investigates the less studied method of using plain EEG signals as the classifier input, with the residual networks (ResNet) as the classifier of interest. ResNet having excelled in the automated hierarchical feature extraction in raw data domains with vast number of samples (e.g., image processing) is potentially promising in the future as the amount of publicly available EEG databases has been increasing. Architecture of the original ResNet designed for image processing is restructured for optimal performance on EEG signals. The arrangement of convolutional kernel dimension is demonstrated to largely affect the model's performance on EEG signal processing. The study is conducted on the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Emotion EEG Dataset (SEED), with our proposed ResNet18 architecture achieving 93.42% accuracy on the 3-class emotion classification, compared to the original ResNet18 at 87.06% accuracy. Our proposed ResNet18 architecture has also achieved a model parameter reduction of 52.22% from the original ResNet18. We have also compared the importance of different subsets of EEG channels from a total of 62 channels for emotion recognition. The channels placed near the anterior pole of the temporal lobes appeared to be most emotionally relevant. This agrees with the location of emotion-processing brain structures like the insular cortex and amygdala. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]