A Flexible Spatio-Temporal Architecture Design for Artifact Removal in EEG With Arbitrary Channel-Settings

Electroencephalography (EEG) data is easily contaminated by various sources, significantly affecting subsequent analyses in neuroscience and clinical applications. Therefore, effective artifact removal is a key step in EEG preprocessing. While current deep learning methods have demonstrated notable efficacy in EEG denoising, single-channel approaches primarily focus on temporal features and neglect inter-channel correlations. Meanwhile, multi-channel methods mainly prioritize spatial features but often overlook the unique temporal dependencies of individual channels. A common limitation of both single-channel and multi-channel methods is their strict requirements on the input channel setting, which restricts their practical applicability. To address these issues, we design a flexible architecture named Artifact removal Spatio-Temporal Integration Network (ASTI-Net), a dual-branch denoising model capable of handling arbitrary EEG channel settings. ASTI-Net utilizes spatio-temporal attention weighting with dual branches that capture inter-channel spatial characteristics and intra-channel temporal dependencies. Its architecture incorporates deformable convolutional operations and channel-wise temporal processing, accommodating varying numbers of EEG channels and enhancing applicability across diverse clinical and research settings. By integrating features from both branches through a fusion reconstruction module, ASTI-Net effectively restores clean multi-channel EEG. Extensive evaluation on two semi-simulated datasets, along with qualitative assessment on real task-state EEG data, validates that ASTI-Net outperforms existing artifact removal methods.