Cross-Subject Tinnitus Diagnosis Based on Multi-Band EEG Contrastive Representation Learning

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is an important technology to explore the central nervous mechanism of tinnitus. However, it is hard to obtain consistent results in many previous studies for the high heterogeneity of tinnitus. In order to identify tinnitus and provide theoretical guidance for the diagnosis and treatment, we propose a robust, data-efficient multi-task learning framework called Multi-band EEG Contrastive Representation Learning (MECRL). In this study, we collect resting-state EEG data from 187 tinnitus patients and 80 healthy subjects to generate a high-quality large-scale EEG dataset on tinnitus diagnosis, and then apply the MECRL framework on the generated dataset to obtain a deep neural network model which can distinguish tinnitus patients from the healthy controls accurately. Subject-independent tinnitus diagnosis experiments are conducted and the result shows that the proposed MECRL method is significantly superior to other state-of-the-art baselines and can be well generalized to unseen topics. Meanwhile, visual experiments on key parameters of the model indicate that the high-classification weight electrodes of tinnitus' EEG signals are mainly distributed in the frontal, parietal and temporal regions. In conclusion, this study facilitates our understanding of the relationship between electrophysiology and pathophysiology changes of tinnitus and provides a new deep learning method (MECRL) to identify the neuronal biomarkers in tinnitus.