Automated Rest EEG-Based Diagnosis of Depression and Schizophrenia Using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Depression (DP) and schizophrenia (SCZ) are both highly prevalent psychiatric disorders, and their diagnosis depends on the examination of symptoms and clinical tests, which can be subjective. As a measure of real-time neural activity, Electroencephalographic (EEG) has shown its usability to classify people either as normal or as having DP or SCZ, but automatic classification between the three categories (DP, SCZ and the normal) was rarely reported. Here, we propose an automatic diagnostic framework based on a convolutional neural network called the Multi-Channel Frequency Network (MUCHf-Net), which automatically learns feature representations of EEGs that characterize them as normal, DP, or SCZ. Two EEG databases were used in this study, the first one contains EEGs from 300 individuals (DP: 100, SCZ: 100, normal: 100) collecting from our hospital, and the second contains EEGs from 30 individuals (DP: 10, SCZ: 10, normal: 10) from public available datasets, and the spectrum matrices from these multi-channel EEGs were feed into MUCHf-Net. The results showed that: (1) MUCHf-Net accurately distinguished normal EEGs from DP or SCZ EEGs (accuracy: 91.12%; F1 score: 0.8947); (2) low-frequency bands (delta, theta, alpha) contributed the most important information to the classification model; (3) features located in the frontal and parietal lobes contributed more than other regions did; (4) MUCHf-Net fine-tuned on public datasets also had high classification accuracy: 87.71% (triple: normal, SCZ or DP) and 79.27% (binary: psychiatric disorders (DP or SCZ) or normal). Our study shows that deep learning has the potential to become an important tool for assisting in the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders.