Depression is a common psychological disorder typically categorized into four grades according to the symptom severity. Accurately diagnosing different grades of depression is significant for taking appropriate treatment strategies to prevent the condition from worsening. Electroencephalography (EEG) has the potential to mirror the prevailing mental state of patients, providing a possible way to diagnose depression. However, it is still a challenge to extract EEG features that reflect varying degrees of depression for automatic grading diagnosis. It has been pointed out that depression involves the intensification of abnormal interactions among distinct brain regions as it advances, which suggests that brain spatial information may play a key role in tracking different grades of depression. Based on this, combined with deep learning models, this paper proposes a new graph-based method for automatic grading diagnosis of depression. A novel graph-based brain network (BN) construction method is first proposed to convert EEG into graph structure containing brain spatial information, where the individual-level (IBN) and group-level brain networks (GBN) are constructed respectively. Next, a new deep learning model P-I-GAT is built based on graph attention networks (GAT) for identifying EEG signals from depression patients with different severity. In specific, the “P” represents the prior information integration capability, synthesizing attribute information from the IBN and structural information from the GBN. The resulting synthesized brain network contains prior information from these two different scales, referred to as the prior brain network (PBN). “I” denotes the multi-rhythm interaction capability, which adaptively assigns learning weights to each rhythmic PBN to fully exploit the information embedded within the PBNs. Ultimately, the proposed method is validated on the open dataset MODMA, achieving an accuracy of 88.57% and a specificity of 91.97%.
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