Deeksha M. Shama

Deeksha M. Shama, Dimitra Emmanouilidou, Ivan J. Tashev

Accurately monitoring cognitive load in real time is critical for Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) that adapt to user engagement and support personalized learning. Electroencephalography (EEG) offers a non-invasive, cost-effective modality for capturing neural activity, though traditional methods often struggle with cross-subject variability and task-specific preprocessing. We propose leveraging Brain Foundation Models (BFMs), large pre-trained neural networks, to extract generalizable EEG features for cognitive load estimation. We adapt BFMs for long-term EEG monitoring and show that fine-tuning a small subset of layers yields improved accuracy over the state-of-the-art. Despite their scale, BFMs allow for real-time inference with a longer context window. To address often-overlooked interpretability challenges, we apply Partition SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) to quantify feature importance. Our findings reveal consistent emphasis on prefrontal regions linked to cognitive control, while longitudinal trends suggest learning progression. These results position BFMs as efficient and interpretable tools for continuous cognitive load monitoring in real-world BCIs.

Deeksha M Shama, Archana Venkataraman

Deep learning methods are at the forefront of automated epileptic seizure detection and onset zone localization using scalp-EEG. However, the performance of deep learning methods rely heavily on the quality of annotated training datasets. Scalp EEG is susceptible to high noise levels, which in turn leads to imprecise annotations of the seizure timing and characteristics. This label noise presents a significant challenge in model training and generalization. In this paper, we introduce a novel statistical framework that informs a deep learning model of label ambiguity, thereby enhancing the overall seizure detection performance. Our Bayesian UncertaiNty-aware Deep Learning, BUNDL, strategy offers a straightforward and model-agnostic method for training deep neural networks with noisy training labels that does not add any parameters to existing architectures. By integrating domain knowledge into the statistical framework, we derive a novel KL-divergence-based loss function that capitalizes on uncertainty to better learn seizure characteristics from scalp EEG. Additionally, we explore the impact of improved seizure detection on the task of automated onset zone localization. We validate BUNDL using a comprehensive simulated EEG dataset and two publicly available datasets, TUH and CHB-MIT. BUNDL consistently improves the performance of three base models on simulated data under seven types of label noise and three EEG signal-to-noise ratios. Similar improvements were observed in the real-world TUH and CHB-MIT datasets. Finally, we demonstrate that BUNDL improves the accuracy of seizure onset zone localization. BUNDL is specifically designed to address label ambiguities, enabling the training of reliable and trustworthy models for epilepsy evaluation.