Graph neural networks for electroencephalogram analysis: Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy use cases

Electroencephalography (EEG) is widely used as a non-invasive technique for the diagnosis of several brain disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy. Until recently, diseases have been identified over EEG readings by human experts, which may not only be specific and difficult to find, but are also subject to human error. Despite the recent emergence of machine learning methods for the interpretation of EEGs, most approaches are not capable of capturing the underlying arbitrary non-Euclidean relations between signals in the different regions of the human brain. In this context, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained attention for their ability to effectively analyze complex relationships within different types of graph-structured data. This includes EEGs, a use case still relatively unexplored. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by presenting a study that applies GNNs for the EEG-based detection of Alzheimer’s disease and discrimination of two different types of seizures. To this end, we demonstrate the value of GNNs by showing that a single GNN architecture can achieve state-of-the-art performance in both use cases. Through design space explorations and explainability analysis, we develop a graph-based transformer that achieves cross-validated accuracies over 89% and 96% in the ternary classification variants of Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy use cases, respectively, matching the intuitions drawn by expert neurologists. We also argue about the computational efficiency, generalizability and potential for real-time operation of GNNs for EEGs, positioning them as a valuable tool for classifying various neurological pathologies and opening up new prospects for research and clinical practice.