Electroencephalogram (EEG) Signal Analysis For Diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) : A Review
Electroencephalogram (EEG) Signal Analysis For Diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) : A Review
Keywords Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) Electroencephalogram (EEG)
Biomarker Quantitative EEG Band power Spectral Asymmetry Index (SASI)
Relative Wavelet Energy (RWE) Higuchi’s Fractal Dimension (HFD)
1 Introduction
2 Quantitative EEG
First human EEG was recorded in 1920s by Hans Berger, a German neuroanatomist
and psychiatrist. With the development of digital computer technology, it was
possible to access and quantify correctly the exact values of many more EEG
variable compared to that obtained by visual inspection of EEG signals. This lead to
the development of Quantitative EEG (QEEG) It provides additional measurement
or topographic display of voltage or frequency of EEG signal. It mathematically
processes EEG signal to format or domain such that specific waveform component
is highlighted, which gives information or numerical values related to EEG data
which can be used for comparison or subsequent evaluation. QEEG technique
which deals with topographic display of voltage or frequency over entire scalp is
called EEG Brain Mapping. QEEG involves factors like amplitude of signal, fre-
quency, waveform, hemispheric reactivity.
3 Methodology
EEG signal consists of information about brain activity from different regions of
brain with the help of electrodes. These EEG signals may be contaminated with
various kinds of artifacts like eye blinks, movements, muscular activity, and
electrical noise from power line. These artifacts need to be removed with the help of
software or by visual detection by experts.
326 S. Mahato and S. Paul
After the removal of artifacts, feature extraction is carried out from the signals
which are used to differentiate between depression and normal subjects.
Basically two types of methods are used for feature extraction: linear and
nonlinear. In linear analysis, frequency and time domain approaches are used.
Mathematical theory of dynamical nonlinear systems forms the basis of nonlinear
EEG analysis.
Feature extracted with linear methods are inter-hemispheric asymmetry, band
power, EEG measurements (amplitude, frequency and power), Wavelet Transform
(WT), Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Auto Regressive (AR) model, and so on.
Feature extracted with nonlinear methods are such as Higuchi’s Fractal Dimension
(HFD), Approximate Entropy (ApEn), Lyapunov Exponent (LE), Correlation
Dimension (CD), Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA), and so on.
Since a large number of features are extracted from each of the channels, using
all the features for classification would lead to high computational cost. Some of the
researchers prefer to decrease this cost by using some of significant features and not
all features. This would substantially reduce the computational cost. Some of the
feature selection and reduction techniques used are Genetic Algorithm (GA),
Principal Components Analysis (PCA), and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA).
Further, the classification is done with the help of different classifier like LR,
SVM, NB, Back Propagation-Artificial Neural Network (BP ANN), LDA,
self-organizing competitive network, k-means clustering, k-Nearest Neighbor
(KNN), Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA), Decision Tree (DT),
Multilayered Perceptron Neural Network (MLPNN), Probablistic Neural Network
(PNN) (Fig. 1).
4 Literature Review
Classification accuracy depends to a great extent on the EEG feature used and
classification techniques used. Extensive research has been done using different
EEG features and different classifiers to improve classification accuracy between
depression patients and normal subjects. Some of the findings related to EEG
features based on present state of the art are discussed in the table.
5 Discussion
6 Conclusion
From the above discussion, it is evident that EEG signals are efficient and reliable in
discriminating between MDD patient and normal subjects. But the major barrier in
finding standardized biomarkers is the absence of standardized common dataset,
techniques, and methodology used. Thus, these issues need to be solved in order to
establish clinically useful and authentic biomarker.
In this review chapter, several papers relating to EEG signal analysis and
depression has been summarized which would be beneficial in guiding and
improving the future research work in this area such that higher accuracy, sensi-
tivity and specificity can be achieved. This would help in the development of
Table 1 Summary of findings related to EEG signal’s features
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than in mental arithmetic state (mean WE = 1.243) [21]. Using RWE, it was found
that right hemisphere has higher energy distribution in depressed patients than
normal subjects [22]
ApEn ApEn is the complexity measure which quantifies ApEn was much lower in MDD patients as compared to normal subjects [23]
(nonlinear regularity and complexity in time series data. ApEn
method) value is positively correlated with unpredictability
and randomness of the signal
DFA DFA analyzes the deviation of the signal with In channels O2 and Pz, the difference between MDD patients and normal subjects
(nonlinear respect to local signal’s tendency in data window were found to be a maximum for DFA. DFA values are significantly lower for
method) depressive group [18]
329
Table 2 Summary of previous work on EEG signal analysis for detection of depression
330
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