Enhanced Performance by Interpretable Low-Frequency Electroencephalogram Oscillations in the Machine Learning-Based Diagnosis of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based diagnosis of psychiatric diseases using machine-learning approaches has made possible the objective diagnosis of various psychiatric diseases. The objective of this study was to improve the performance of a resting-state EEG-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), by optimizing the frequency bands used to extract EEG features. We used eyes-closed resting-state EEG data recorded from 77 PTSD patients and 58 healthy controls (HC). Source-level power spectrum densities (PSDs) of the resting-state EEG data were extracted from 6 frequency bands (delta, theta, alpha, low-beta, high-beta, and gamma), and the PSD features of each frequency band and their combinations were independently used to discriminate PTSD and HC. The classification performance was evaluated using support vector machine with leave-one-out cross validation. The PSD features extracted from slower-frequency bands (delta and theta) showed significantly higher classification performance than those of relatively higher-frequency bands. The best classification performance was achieved when using delta PSD features (86.61%), which was significantly higher than that reported in a recent study by about 13%. The PSD features selected to obtain better classification performances could be explained from a neurophysiological point of view, demonstrating the promising potential to develop a clinically reliable EEG-based CAD system for PTSD diagnosis.

Systematic review of machine learning in PTSD studies for automated diagnosis evaluation

“…By integrating microstate-based segmentation of various EEG frequencies with an SVM classifier, Terpou et al integrated microstate-based segmentation of different EEG frequencies with an SVM classifier, distinguishing PTSD with an accuracy of 76%, AUC of 0.75, sensitivity of 0.79, and specificity of 0.74 39 . Shim et al‘s 2022 study demonstrated that low-frequency EEG oscillations with an SVM classifier could increase the predictive accuracy to 86.61%, with an AUC of 0.93, analyzing resting-state EEG data at the source level in six frequency bands 40 .…”