Objective Depression Detection Using EEG and Eye Movement Signals Induced by Oil Paintings.

Abstract

Depression is a mental disorder characterized by persistent sadness and loss of interest, which has become one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. There are currently no objective diagnostic standards for depression in clinical practice. Previous studies have shown that depression causes both brain abnormalities and behavioral disorders. In this study, both electroencephalography (EEG) and eye movement signals were used to objectively detect depression. By presenting 40 carefully selected oil paintings-20 positive and 20 negative-as stimuli, we were able to successfully evoke emotions in 48 depressed patients (DPs) and 40 healthy controls (HCs) from three centers. We then used Transformer, a deep learning model, to conduct emotion recognition and depression detection. The experimental results demonstrate that: a) Transformer achieves the best accuracies of 89.21% and 92.19% in emotion recognition and depression detection, respectively; b) The HC group has higher accuracies than the DP group in emotion recognition for both subject-dependent and subject-independent experiments; c) The neural pattern differences do exist between DPs and HCs, and we find the consistent asymmetry of the neural patterns in DPs; d) For depression detection, using single oil painting achieves the best accuracies, and using negative oil paintings has higher accuracies than using positive oil paintings. These findings suggest that EEG and eye movement signals induced by oil paintings can be used to objectively identify depression.