Adolescent depression recognition and symptom prediction based on multi-view EEG network: an exploratory study

Adolescent depression diagnosis currently relies primarily on subjective self-report questionnaires, with a notable lack of objective neurobiological biomarkers. This study aimed to compare the diagnostic performance of traditional psychological scales with a newly developed Multi-view Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network (MVA-GCN) based on resting-state electroencephalography (EEG), and to exploratorily examine the associations between MVA-GCN-derived brain network features and psychological resilience in adolescents.

Resting-state EEG data were collected from 44 adolescents with major depressive disorder (MDD) and 30 healthy controls (HCs). The MVA-GCN model integrated three parallel connectivity views-phase-locking value (PLV), Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC), and phase lag index (PLI)-via an adaptive fusion mechanism. We compared the classification performance of questionnaire-based machine learning models against the MVA-GCN, and further examined the correlations between model-highlighted network features and clinical symptom measures, including depression, anxiety, loneliness, rumination, and resilience, with age and sex included as covariates.

Questionnaire-based machine learning models achieved a mean classification accuracy of 86.43%, whereas the MVA-GCN attained 99.84% accuracy in the present dataset. Occipital and fronto-central regions contributed most to the model's predictions. Increased gamma-band functional connectivity and reduced alpha-band power were identified as potential electrophysiological correlates of group differences. Exploratory correlational analyses at the nominal level (p < 0.05, uncorrected) suggested potential group-specific patterns in brain-resilience associations. A post-hoc deviation index analysis showed that, within the MDD group, greater deviation from the healthy reference brain-resilience association pattern was significantly correlated with more severe rumination, self-rated depression, clinician-rated depression severity, loneliness, and self-rated anxiety (all FDR q < 0.05).

In this exploratory sample, the MVA-GCN demonstrated promising proof-of-concept discriminative capability for adolescent depression compared with traditional self-report scales. However, the brain-resilience association findings were not statistically significant after correction for multiple comparisons and should be interpreted with caution. These results suggest that MVA-GCN-derived network features warrant further investigation in larger, independent cohorts, but do not yet support their use as a clinically validated diagnostic tool.