Dirk De Ridder

Yuan Yue, Jeremiah D. Deng, Dirk De Ridder et al.

Obesity is a common issue in modern societies today that can lead to various diseases and significantly reduced quality of life. Currently, research has been conducted to investigate resting state EEG (electroencephalogram) signals with an aim to identify possible neurological characteristics associated with obesity. In this study, we propose a deep learning-based framework to extract the resting state EEG features for obese and lean subject classification. Specifically, a novel variational autoencoder framework is employed to extract subject-invariant features from the raw EEG signals, which are then classified by a 1-D convolutional neural network. Comparing with conventional machine learning and deep learning methods, we demonstrate the superiority of using VAE for feature extraction, as reflected by the significantly improved classification accuracies, better visualizations and reduced impurity measures in the feature representations. Future work can be directed to gaining an in-depth understanding regarding the spatial patterns that have been learned by the proposed model from a neurological view, as well as improving the interpretability of the proposed model by allowing it to uncover any temporal-related information.

Yuan Yue, Dirk De Ridder, Patrick Manning et al.

Obesity is a serious issue in the modern society and is often associated to significantly reduced quality of life. Current research conducted to explore obesity-related neurological evidences using electroencephalography (EEG) data are limited to traditional approaches. In this study, we developed a novel machine learning model to identify brain networks of obese females using alpha band functional connectivity features derived from EEG data. An overall classification accuracy of 0.937 is achieved. Our finding suggests that the obese brain is characterized by a dysfunctional network in which the areas that responsible for processing self-referential information and environmental context information are impaired.

Jean Li, Dirk De Ridder, Divya Adhia et al.

\textit{Objective:} Diagnosing pain in research and clinical practices still relies on self-report. This study aims to develop an automatic approach that works on resting-state raw EEG data for chronic knee pain prediction. \textit{Method:} A new feature selection algorithm called ``modified Sequential Floating Forward Selection'' (mSFFS) is proposed. The improved feature selection scheme can better avoid local minima and explore alternative search routes. \textit{Results:} The feature selection obtained by mSFFS displays better class separability as indicated by the Bhattacharyya distance measures and better visualization results. It also outperforms selections generated by other benchmark methods, boosting the test accuracy to 97.5\%. \textit{Conclusion:} The improved feature selection searches out a compact, effective subset of connectivity features that produces competitive performance on chronic knee pain prediction. \textit{Significance:} We have shown that an automatic approach can be employed to find a compact connectivity feature set that effectively predicts chronic knee pain from EEG. It may shed light on the research of chronic pains and lead to future clinical solutions for diagnosis and treatment.

Jean Li, Jeremiah D. Deng, Divya Adhia et al.

Effective analysis of EEG signals for potential clinical applications remains a challenging task. So far, the analysis and conditioning of EEG have largely remained sex-neutral. This paper employs a machine learning approach to explore the evidence of sex effects on EEG signals, and confirms the generality of these effects by achieving successful sex prediction of resting-state EEG signals. We have found that the brain connectivity represented by the coherence between certain sensor channels are good predictors of sex.