A noval 4D graph temporal brain network model for EEG-based depression detection

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) represents a multifaceted and widespread mental health condition marked by substantial alterations in brain connectivity and neural dynamics, causing physiological stress. Accurate diagnosis via electroencephalography (EEG) is challenging due to the complexities in capturing both linear and nonlinear features of brain activity that vary over time and among individuals. Current EEG-based methods for MDD detection inadequately integrate spatial structure and temporal dependencies, often emphasising spatial proximity without functional relevance or using feature extraction techniques that neglect essential brain dynamics. To address these issues, we propose a novel advanced deep learning model: a 4D Graph Temporal Network (4D-GTNet) algorithm that works on a 4D graph brain network for MDD detection. The proposed methodology includes key innovations: A comprehensive 4D feature cube (A structured representation of EEG data combining spatial (channel), frequency (band), time (temporal slice), and statistical features. Each sample is modeled as a tensor or cube) from EEG data slices including linear and nonlinear features (statistical, temporal, and frequency) is extracted. An advanced nearest-neighbor-based method is employed to identify the functionally relevant spatial relationships among EEG channels. The integration of Graph Convolution and Gate recurrent Unit for capturing the spatiotemporal features is proposed with a channel-wise Max-Pooling module-Graph Temporal Max Pooling (GTMP) to retain critical channel-specific information by identifying the most informative channels. The experiment is conducted on data for 490 slices, 232 for MDD and 248 for Healthy Control (HC)) achieving 83.67% of accuracy. Experiments show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models. Our method captures the complex dynamics of EEG signals effectively, enhances the understanding of brain connectivity patterns linked to MDD, and facilitates more accurate depression diagnoses.