Towards high-accuracy classifying attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders using CNN-LSTM model

Objective. The neurocognitive attention functions involve the cooperation of multiple brain regions, and the defects in the cooperation will lead to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which is one of the most common neuropsychiatric disorders for children. The current ADHD diagnosis is mainly based on a subjective evaluation that is easily biased by the experience of the clinicians and lacks the support of objective indicators. The purpose of this study is to propose a method that can effectively identify children with ADHD.Approach. In this study, we proposed a CNN-LSTM model to solve the three-class problems of classifying ADHD, attention deficit disorder (ADD) and healthy children, based on a public electroencephalogram (EEG) dataset that includes event-related potential (ERP) EEG signals of 144 children. The convolution visualization and saliency map methods were used to observe the features automatically extracted by the proposed model, which could intuitively explain how the model distinguished different groups.Main results. The results showed that our CNN-LSTM model could achieve an accuracy as high as 98.23% in a five-fold cross-validation method, which was significantly better than the current state-of-the-art CNN models. The features extracted by the proposed model were mainly located in the frontal and central areas, with significant differences in the time period mappings among the three different groups. The P300 and contingent negative variation (CNV) in the frontal lobe had the largest decrease in the healthy control (HC) group, and the ADD group had the smallest decrease. In the central area, only the HC group had a significant negative oscillation of CNV waves.Significance. The results of this study suggest that the CNN-LSTM model can effectively identify children with ADHD and its subtypes. The visualized features automatically extracted by this model could better explain the differences in the ERP response among different groups, which is more convincing than previous studies, and it could be used as more reliable neural biomarkers to help with more accurate diagnosis in the clinics.