Diagnose ADHD disorder in children using convolutional neural network based on continuous mental task EEG

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a chronic behavioral disorder in children. Children with ADHD face many difficulties in maintaining their concentration and controlling their behaviors. Early diagnosis of this disorder is one of the most important challenges in its control and treatment. No definitive expert method has been found to detect this disorder early. Our goal in this study is to develop an assistive tool for physicians to recognize ADHD children from healthy children using electroencephalography (EEG) based on a continuous mental task.

We used EEG signals recorded from 31 ADHD children and 30 healthy children. In this study, we developed a deep learning model using a convolutional neural network that have had significant performance in image processing fields. For this purpose, we first preprocessed EEG signals to eliminate noise and artifacts. Then we segmented preprocessed samples into more samples. We extracted the theta, alpha, beta, and gamma frequency bands from each segmented sample and formed a color RGB image with three channels. Eventually, we imported the resulting images into a 13-layer convolutional neural network for feature extraction and classification.

The proposed model was evaluated by 5-fold cross validation for train, evaluation, and test data and achieved an average accuracy of 99.06%, 97.81%, 97.47% for segmented samples. The average accuracy for subject-based test samples was 98.48%. Also, the performance of the model was evaluated using the confusion matrix with precision, recall, and f1-score metrics. The results of these metrics also confirmed the outstanding performance of the model.

The accuracy, precision, recall, and f1-score of our model were better than all previous works for diagnosing ADHD in children. Based on these prominent and reliable results, this technique can be used as an assistive tool for the physicians in the early diagnosis of ADHD in children.