Multi-Branch Mutual-Distillation Transformer for EEG-Based Seizure Subtype Classification.

Cross-subject electroencephalogram (EEG) based seizure subtype classification is very important in precise epilepsy diagnostics. Deep learning is a promising solution, due to its ability to automatically extract latent patterns. However, it usually requires a large amount of training data, which may not always be available in clinical practice. This paper proposes Multi-Branch Mutual-Distillation (MBMD) Transformer for cross-subject EEG-based seizure subtype classification, which can be effectively trained from small labeled data. MBMD Transformer replaces all even-numbered encoder blocks of the vanilla Vision Transformer by our designed multi-branch encoder blocks. A mutual-distillation strategy is proposed to transfer knowledge between the raw EEG data and its wavelets of different frequency bands. Experiments on two public EEG datasets demonstrated that our proposed MBMD Transformer outperformed several traditional machine learning and state-of-the-art deep learning approaches. To our knowledge, this is the first work on knowledge distillation for EEG-based seizure subtype classification.

Mixture of Experts for EEG-Based Seizure Subtype Classification.

Epilepsy is a pervasive neurological disorder affecting approximately 50 million individuals worldwide. Electroencephalogram (EEG) based seizure subtype classification plays a crucial role in epilepsy diagnosis and treatment. However, automatic seizure subtype classification faces at least two challenges: 1) class imbalance, i.e., certain seizure types are considerably less common than others; and 2) no a priori knowledge integration, so that a large number of labeled EEG samples are needed to train a machine learning model, particularly, deep learning. This paper proposes two novel Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, Seizure-MoE and Mix-MoE, for EEG-based seizure subtype classification. Particularly, Mix-MoE adequately addresses the above two challenges: 1) it introduces a novel imbalanced sampler to address significant class imbalance; and 2) it incorporates a priori knowledge of manual EEG features into the deep neural network to improve the classification performance. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrated that the proposed Seizure-MoE and Mix-MoE outperformed multiple existing approaches in cross-subject EEG-based seizure subtype classification. Our proposed MoE models may also be easily extended to other EEG classification problems with severe class imbalance, e.g., sleep stage classification.

Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) for Privacy-Preserving Seizure Subtype Classification.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) based seizure subtype classification is very important in clinical diagnostics. Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) uses a pre-trained source model, instead of the source data, for privacy-preserving transfer learning. SFDA is useful in seizure subtype classification, which can protect the privacy of the source patients, while reducing the amount of labeled calibration data for a new patient. This paper introduces semi-supervised transfer boosting (SS-TrBoosting), a boosting-based SFDA approach for seizure subtype classification. We further extend it to unsupervised transfer boosting (U-TrBoosting) for unsupervised SFDA, i.e., the new patient does not need any labeled EEG data. Experiments on three public seizure datasets demonstrated that SS-TrBoosting and U-TrBoosting outperformed multiple classical and state-of-the-art machine learning approaches in cross-dataset/cross-patient seizure subtype classification.

BoostTree and BoostForest for Ensemble Learning.

Bootstrap aggregating (Bagging) and boosting are two popular ensemble learning approaches, which combine multiple base learners to generate a composite model for more accurate and more reliable performance. They have been widely used in biology, engineering, healthcare, etc. This article proposes BoostForest, which is an ensemble learning approach using BoostTree as base learners and can be used for both classification and regression. BoostTree constructs a tree model by gradient boosting. It increases the randomness (diversity) by drawing the cut-points randomly at node splitting. BoostForest further increases the randomness by bootstrapping the training data in constructing different BoostTrees. BoostForest generally outperformed four classical ensemble learning approaches (Random Forest, Extra-Trees, XGBoost and LightGBM) on 35 classification and regression datasets. Remarkably, BoostForest tunes its parameters by simply sampling them randomly from a parameter pool, which can be easily specified, and its ensemble learning framework can also be used to combine many other base learners.

TIE-EEGNet: Temporal Information Enhanced EEGNet for Seizure Subtype Classification.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) based seizure subtype classification is very important in clinical diagnostics. However, manual seizure subtype classification is expensive and time-consuming, whereas automatic classification usually needs a large number of labeled samples for model training. This paper proposes an EEGNet-based slim deep neural network, which relieves the labeled data requirement in EEG-based seizure subtype classification. A temporal information enhancement module with sinusoidal encoding is used to augment the first convolution layer of EEGNet. A training strategy for automatic hyper-parameter selection is also proposed. Experiments on the public TUSZ dataset and our own CHSZ dataset with infants and children demonstrated that our proposed TIE-EEGNet outperformed several traditional and deep learning models in cross-subject seizure subtype classification. Additionally, it also achieved the best performance in a challenging transfer learning scenario. Both our code and the CHSZ dataset are publicized.

Transfer learning for motor imagery based brain-computer interfaces: A tutorial.

A brain-computer interface (BCI) enables a user to communicate directly with an external device, e.g., a computer, using brain signals. It can be used to research, map, assist, augment, or repair human cognitive or sensory-motor functions. A closed-loop BCI system performs signal acquisition, temporal filtering, spatial filtering, feature engineering and classification, before sending out the control signal to an external device. Transfer learning (TL) has been widely used in motor imagery (MI) based BCIs to reduce the calibration effort for a new subject, greatly increasing their utility. This tutorial describes how TL can be considered in as many components of a BCI system as possible, and introduces a complete TL pipeline for MI-based BCIs. Examples on two MI datasets demonstrated the advantages of considering TL in multiple components of MI-based BCIs. Especially, integrating data alignment and sophisticated TL approaches can significantly improve the classification performance, and hence greatly reduces the calibration effort.