A deep learning approach in automated detection of schizophrenia using scalogram images of EEG signals

This study presents a method with high accuracy performance that aims to automatically detect schizophrenia (SZ) from electroencephalography (EEG) records. Unlike related literature studies using traditional machine learning algorithms, the features required for the training of the network are automatically extracted from the EEG records in our method. In order to obtain the time frequency features of the EEG signals, the signal was converted into 2D by using the Continuous Wavelet Transform method. This study has the highest accuracy performance in the relevant literature by using 2D time frequency features in automatic detection of SZ disease. It is trained with Visual Geometry Group-16 (VGG16), an advanced convolutional neural networks (CNN) deep learning network architecture, to extract key features found on scalogram images and train the network. The study shows a high success in classifying SZ patients and healthy individuals with a very satisfactory accuracy of 98% and 99.5%, respectively, using two different datasets consisting of individuals from different age groups. Using different techniques [Activization Maximization, Saliency Map, and Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM)] to visualize the learning outcomes of the CNN network, the relationship of frequency components between SZ and the healthy individual is clearly shown. Moreover, with these interpretable outcomes, the difference between SZ patients and healthy individuals can be distinguished very easily help for expert opinion.