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Sep 3

SzCORE as a benchmark: report from the seizure detection challenge at the 2025 AI in Epilepsy and Neurological Disorders Conference

Reliable automatic seizure detection from long-term EEG remains a challenge, as current machine learning models often fail to generalize across patients or clinical settings. Manual EEG review remains the clinical standard, underscoring the need for robust models and standardized evaluation. To rigorously assess algorithm performance, we organized a challenge using a private dataset of continuous EEG recordings from 65 subjects (4,360 hours). Expert neurophysiologists annotated the data, providing ground truth for seizure events. Participants were required to detect seizure onset and duration, with evaluation based on event-based metrics, including sensitivity, precision, F1-score, and false positives per day. The SzCORE framework ensured standardized evaluation. The primary ranking criterion was the event-based F1-score, reflecting clinical relevance by balancing sensitivity and false positives. The challenge received 30 submissions from 19 teams, with 28 algorithms evaluated. Results revealed wide variability in performance, with a top F1-score of 43% (sensitivity 37%, precision 45%), highlighting the ongoing difficulty of seizure detection. The challenge also revealed a gap between reported performance and real-world evaluation, emphasizing the importance of rigorous benchmarking. Compared to previous challenges and commercial systems, the best-performing algorithm in this contest showed improved performance. Importantly, the challenge platform now supports continuous benchmarking, enabling reproducible research, integration of new datasets, and clinical evaluation of seizure detection algorithms using a standardized framework.

VSViG: Real-time Video-based Seizure Detection via Skeleton-based Spatiotemporal ViG

An accurate and efficient epileptic seizure onset detection can significantly benefit patients. Traditional diagnostic methods, primarily relying on electroencephalograms (EEGs), often result in cumbersome and non-portable solutions, making continuous patient monitoring challenging. The video-based seizure detection system is expected to free patients from the constraints of scalp or implanted EEG devices and enable remote monitoring in residential settings. Previous video-based methods neither enable all-day monitoring nor provide short detection latency due to insufficient resources and ineffective patient action recognition techniques. Additionally, skeleton-based action recognition approaches remain limitations in identifying subtle seizure-related actions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Video-based Seizure detection model via a skeleton-based spatiotemporal Vision Graph neural network (VSViG) for its efficient, accurate and timely purpose in real-time scenarios. Our experimental results indicate VSViG outperforms previous state-of-the-art action recognition models on our collected patients' video data with higher accuracy (5.9% error), lower FLOPs (0.4G), and smaller model size (1.4M). Furthermore, by integrating a decision-making rule that combines output probabilities and an accumulative function, we achieve a 5.1 s detection latency after EEG onset, a 13.1 s detection advance before clinical onset, and a zero false detection rate. The project homepage is available at: https://github.com/xuyankun/VSViG/

DBConformer: Dual-Branch Convolutional Transformer for EEG Decoding

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) transform spontaneous/evoked neural activity into control commands for external communication. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) remain the mainstream backbone for EEG decoding, their inherently short receptive field makes it difficult to capture long-range temporal dependencies and global inter-channel relationships. Recent CNN-Transformer (Conformers) hybrids partially address this issue, but most adopt a serial design, resulting in suboptimal integration of local and global features, and often overlook explicit channel-wise modeling. To address these limitations, we propose DBConformer, a dual-branch convolutional Transformer network tailored for EEG decoding. It integrates a temporal Conformer to model long-range temporal dependencies and a spatial Conformer to extract inter-channel interactions, capturing both temporal dynamics and spatial patterns in EEG signals. A lightweight channel attention module further refines spatial representations by assigning data-driven importance to EEG channels. Extensive experiments on five motor imagery (MI) datasets and two seizure detection datasets under three evaluation settings demonstrate that DBConformer consistently outperforms 10 competitive baseline models, with over eight times fewer parameters than the high-capacity EEG Conformer baseline. Further, the visualization results confirm that the features extracted by DBConformer are physiologically interpretable and aligned with sensorimotor priors in MI. The superior performance and interpretability of DBConformer make it reliable for robust and explainable EEG decoding. Code is publicized at https://github.com/wzwvv/DBConformer.

A foundation model with multi-variate parallel attention to generate neuronal activity

Learning from multi-variate time-series with heterogeneous channel configurations remains a fundamental challenge for deep neural networks (DNNs), particularly in clinical domains such as intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG), where channel setups vary widely across subjects. In this work, we introduce multi-variate parallel attention (MVPA), a novel self-attention mechanism that disentangles content, temporal, and spatial attention, enabling flexible, generalizable, and efficient modeling of time-series data with varying channel counts and configurations. We use MVPA to build MVPFormer, a generative foundation model for human electrophysiology, trained to predict the evolution of iEEG signals across diverse subjects. To support this and future effort by the community, we release the SWEC iEEG dataset, the largest publicly available iEEG dataset to date, comprising nearly 10,000 hours of recordings from heterogeneous clinical sources. MVPFormer leverages MVPA to achieve strong generalization across subjects, demonstrating expert-level performance in seizure detection and outperforming state-of-the-art Transformer baselines on our SWEC, the MAYO, and the FNUSA dataset. We further validate MVPA on standard time-series forecasting and classification tasks, where it matches or exceeds existing attention-based models. Together, our contributions establish MVPA as a general-purpose attention mechanism for heterogeneous time-series and MVPFormer as the first open-source, open-weights, and open-data iEEG foundation model with state-of-the-art clinical performance. The code is available at https://github.com/IBM/multi-variate-parallel-transformer. The SWEC iEEG dataset is available at https://mb-neuro.medical-blocks.ch/public_access/databases/ieeg/swec_ieeg.

EEGFormer: Towards Transferable and Interpretable Large-Scale EEG Foundation Model

Self-supervised learning has emerged as a highly effective approach in the fields of natural language processing and computer vision. It is also applicable to brain signals such as electroencephalography (EEG) data, given the abundance of available unlabeled data that exist in a wide spectrum of real-world medical applications ranging from seizure detection to wave analysis. The existing works leveraging self-supervised learning on EEG modeling mainly focus on pretraining upon each individual dataset corresponding to a single downstream task, which cannot leverage the power of abundant data, and they may derive sub-optimal solutions with a lack of generalization. Moreover, these methods rely on end-to-end model learning which is not easy for humans to understand. In this paper, we present a novel EEG foundation model, namely EEGFormer, pretrained on large-scale compound EEG data. The pretrained model cannot only learn universal representations on EEG signals with adaptable performance on various downstream tasks but also provide interpretable outcomes of the useful patterns within the data. To validate the effectiveness of our model, we extensively evaluate it on various downstream tasks and assess the performance under different transfer settings. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the learned model exhibits transferable anomaly detection performance and provides valuable interpretability of the acquired patterns via self-supervised learning.

Chirp Localization via Fine-Tuned Transformer Model: A Proof-of-Concept Study

Spectrograms are pivotal in time-frequency signal analysis, widely used in audio processing and computational neuroscience. Chirp-like patterns in electroencephalogram (EEG) spectrograms (marked by linear or exponential frequency sweep) are key biomarkers for seizure dynamics, but automated tools for their detection, localization, and feature extraction are lacking. This study bridges this gap by fine-tuning a Vision Transformer (ViT) model on synthetic spectrograms, augmented with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to boost adaptability. We generated 100000 synthetic spectrograms with chirp parameters, creating the first large-scale benchmark for chirp localization. These spectrograms mimic neural chirps using linear or exponential frequency sweep, Gaussian noise, and smoothing. A ViT model, adapted for regression, predicted chirp parameters. LoRA fine-tuned the attention layers, enabling efficient updates to the pre-trained backbone. Training used MSE loss and the AdamW optimizer, with a learning rate scheduler and early stopping to curb overfitting. Only three features were targeted: Chirp Start Time (Onset Time), Chirp Start Frequency (Onset Frequency), and Chirp End Frequency (Offset Frequency). Performance was evaluated via Pearson correlation between predicted and actual labels. Results showed strong alignment: 0.9841 correlation for chirp start time, with stable inference times (137 to 140s) and minimal bias in error distributions. This approach offers a tool for chirp analysis in EEG time-frequency representation, filling a critical methodological void.

EEGDM: EEG Representation Learning via Generative Diffusion Model

While electroencephalogram (EEG) has been a crucial tool for monitoring the brain and diagnosing neurological disorders (e.g., epilepsy), learning meaningful representations from raw EEG signals remains challenging due to limited annotations and high signal variability. Recently, EEG foundation models (FMs) have shown promising potential by adopting transformer architectures and self-supervised pre-training methods from large language models (e.g., masked prediction) to learn representations from diverse EEG data, followed by fine-tuning on specific EEG tasks. Nonetheless, these large models often incurred high computational costs during both training and inference, with only marginal performance improvements as model size increases. In this work, we proposed EEG representation learning framework building upon Generative Diffusion Model (EEGDM). Specifically, we developed structured state-space model for diffusion pretraining (SSMDP) to better capture the temporal dynamics of EEG signals and trained the architecture using a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model. The resulting latent EEG representations were then used for downstream classification tasks via our proposed latent fusion transformer (LFT). To evaluate our method, we used the multi-event Temple University EEG Event Corpus and compared EEGDM with current state-of-the-art approaches, including EEG FMs. Empirical results showed that our method outperformed existing methods while being approximately 19x more lightweight. These findings suggested that EEGDM offered a promising alternative to current FMs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/jhpuah/EEGDM.

Alljoined-1.6M: A Million-Trial EEG-Image Dataset for Evaluating Affordable Brain-Computer Interfaces

We present a new large-scale electroencephalography (EEG) dataset as part of the THINGS initiative, comprising over 1.6 million visual stimulus trials collected from 20 participants, and totaling more than twice the size of the most popular current benchmark dataset, THINGS-EEG2. Crucially, our data was recorded using a 32-channel consumer-grade wet electrode system costing ~$2.2k, around 27x cheaper than research-grade EEG systems typically used in cognitive neuroscience labs. Our work is one of the first open-source, large-scale EEG resource designed to closely reflect the quality of hardware that is practical to deploy in real-world, downstream applications of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). We aim to explore the specific question of whether deep neural network-based BCI research and semantic decoding methods can be effectively conducted with such affordable systems, filling an important gap in current literature that is extremely relevant for future research. In our analysis, we not only demonstrate that decoding of high-level semantic information from EEG of visualized images is possible at consumer-grade hardware, but also that our data can facilitate effective EEG-to-Image reconstruction even despite significantly lower signal-to-noise ratios. In addition to traditional benchmarks, we also conduct analyses of EEG-to-Image models that demonstrate log-linear decoding performance with increasing data volume on our data, and discuss the trade-offs between hardware cost, signal fidelity, and the scale of data collection efforts in increasing the size and utility of currently available datasets. Our contributions aim to pave the way for large-scale, cost-effective EEG research with widely accessible equipment, and position our dataset as a unique resource for the democratization and development of effective deep neural models of visual cognition.

Real-time accident detection and physiological signal monitoring to enhance motorbike safety and emergency response

Rapid urbanization and improved living standards have led to a substantial increase in the number of vehicles on the road, consequently resulting in a rise in the frequency of accidents. Among these accidents, motorbike accidents pose a particularly high risk, often resulting in serious injuries or deaths. A significant number of these fatalities occur due to delayed or inadequate medical attention. To this end, we propose a novel automatic detection and notification system specifically designed for motorbike accidents. The proposed system comprises two key components: a detection system and a physiological signal monitoring system. The detection system is integrated into the helmet and consists of a microcontroller, accelerometer, GPS, GSM, and Wi-Fi modules. The physio-monitoring system incorporates a sensor for monitoring pulse rate and SpO_{2} saturation. All collected data are presented on an LCD display and wirelessly transmitted to the detection system through the microcontroller of the physiological signal monitoring system. If the accelerometer readings consistently deviate from the specified threshold decided through extensive experimentation, the system identifies the event as an accident and transmits the victim's information -- including the GPS location, pulse rate, and SpO_{2} saturation rate -- to the designated emergency contacts. Preliminary results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed system in accurately detecting motorbike accidents and promptly alerting emergency contacts. We firmly believe that the proposed system has the potential to significantly mitigate the risks associated with motorbike accidents and save lives.

Amplifying Pathological Detection in EEG Signaling Pathways through Cross-Dataset Transfer Learning

Pathology diagnosis based on EEG signals and decoding brain activity holds immense importance in understanding neurological disorders. With the advancement of artificial intelligence methods and machine learning techniques, the potential for accurate data-driven diagnoses and effective treatments has grown significantly. However, applying machine learning algorithms to real-world datasets presents diverse challenges at multiple levels. The scarcity of labelled data, especially in low regime scenarios with limited availability of real patient cohorts due to high costs of recruitment, underscores the vital deployment of scaling and transfer learning techniques. In this study, we explore a real-world pathology classification task to highlight the effectiveness of data and model scaling and cross-dataset knowledge transfer. As such, we observe varying performance improvements through data scaling, indicating the need for careful evaluation and labelling. Additionally, we identify the challenges of possible negative transfer and emphasize the significance of some key components to overcome distribution shifts and potential spurious correlations and achieve positive transfer. We see improvement in the performance of the target model on the target (NMT) datasets by using the knowledge from the source dataset (TUAB) when a low amount of labelled data was available. Our findings indicate a small and generic model (e.g. ShallowNet) performs well on a single dataset, however, a larger model (e.g. TCN) performs better on transfer and learning from a larger and diverse dataset.

Representation learning for improved interpretability and classification accuracy of clinical factors from EEG

Despite extensive standardization, diagnostic interviews for mental health disorders encompass substantial subjective judgment. Previous studies have demonstrated that EEG-based neural measures can function as reliable objective correlates of depression, or even predictors of depression and its course. However, their clinical utility has not been fully realized because of 1) the lack of automated ways to deal with the inherent noise associated with EEG data at scale, and 2) the lack of knowledge of which aspects of the EEG signal may be markers of a clinical disorder. Here we adapt an unsupervised pipeline from the recent deep representation learning literature to address these problems by 1) learning a disentangled representation using beta-VAE to denoise the signal, and 2) extracting interpretable features associated with a sparse set of clinical labels using a Symbol-Concept Association Network (SCAN). We demonstrate that our method is able to outperform the canonical hand-engineered baseline classification method on a number of factors, including participant age and depression diagnosis. Furthermore, our method recovers a representation that can be used to automatically extract denoised Event Related Potentials (ERPs) from novel, single EEG trajectories, and supports fast supervised re-mapping to various clinical labels, allowing clinicians to re-use a single EEG representation regardless of updates to the standardized diagnostic system. Finally, single factors of the learned disentangled representations often correspond to meaningful markers of clinical factors, as automatically detected by SCAN, allowing for human interpretability and post-hoc expert analysis of the recommendations made by the model.

Parkinson's Disease Classification via EEG: All You Need is a Single Convolutional Layer

In this work, we introduce LightCNN, a minimalist Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture designed for Parkinson's disease (PD) classification using EEG data. LightCNN's strength lies in its simplicity, utilizing just a single convolutional layer. Embracing Leonardo da Vinci's principle that "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication," LightCNN demonstrates that complexity is not required to achieve outstanding results. We benchmarked LightCNN against several state-of-the-art deep learning models known for their effectiveness in EEG-based PD classification. Remarkably, LightCNN outperformed all these complex architectures, with a 2.3% improvement in recall, a 4.6% increase in precision, a 0.1% edge in AUC, a 4% boost in F1-score, and a 3.3% higher accuracy compared to the closest competitor. Furthermore, LightCNN identifies known pathological brain rhythms associated with PD and effectively captures clinically relevant neurophysiological changes in EEG. Its simplicity and interpretability make it ideal for deployment in resource-constrained environments, such as mobile or embedded systems for EEG analysis. In conclusion, LightCNN represents a significant step forward in efficient EEG-based PD classification, demonstrating that a well-designed, lightweight model can achieve superior performance over more complex architectures. This work underscores the potential for minimalist models to meet the needs of modern healthcare applications, particularly where resources are limited.

Wearable data from subjects playing Super Mario, sitting university exams, or performing physical exercise help detect acute mood episodes via self-supervised learning

Personal sensing, leveraging data passively and near-continuously collected with wearables from patients in their ecological environment, is a promising paradigm to monitor mood disorders (MDs), a major determinant of worldwide disease burden. However, collecting and annotating wearable data is very resource-intensive. Studies of this kind can thus typically afford to recruit only a couple dozens of patients. This constitutes one of the major obstacles to applying modern supervised machine learning techniques to MDs detection. In this paper, we overcome this data bottleneck and advance the detection of MDs acute episode vs stable state from wearables data on the back of recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL). This leverages unlabelled data to learn representations during pre-training, subsequently exploited for a supervised task. First, we collected open-access datasets recording with an Empatica E4 spanning different, unrelated to MD monitoring, personal sensing tasks -- from emotion recognition in Super Mario players to stress detection in undergraduates -- and devised a pre-processing pipeline performing on-/off-body detection, sleep-wake detection, segmentation, and (optionally) feature extraction. With 161 E4-recorded subjects, we introduce E4SelfLearning, the largest to date open access collection, and its pre-processing pipeline. Second, we show that SSL confidently outperforms fully-supervised pipelines using either our novel E4-tailored Transformer architecture (E4mer) or classical baseline XGBoost: 81.23% against 75.35% (E4mer) and 72.02% (XGBoost) correctly classified recording segments from 64 (half acute, half stable) patients. Lastly, we illustrate that SSL performance is strongly associated with the specific surrogate task employed for pre-training as well as with unlabelled data availability.

Upper Limb Movement Recognition utilising EEG and EMG Signals for Rehabilitative Robotics

Upper limb movement classification, which maps input signals to the target activities, is a key building block in the control of rehabilitative robotics. Classifiers are trained for the rehabilitative system to comprehend the desires of the patient whose upper limbs do not function properly. Electromyography (EMG) signals and Electroencephalography (EEG) signals are used widely for upper limb movement classification. By analysing the classification results of the real-time EEG and EMG signals, the system can understand the intention of the user and predict the events that one would like to carry out. Accordingly, it will provide external help to the user. However, the noise in the real-time EEG and EMG data collection process contaminates the effectiveness of the data, which undermines classification performance. Moreover, not all patients process strong EMG signals due to muscle damage and neuromuscular disorder. To address these issues, this paper explores different feature extraction techniques and machine learning and deep learning models for EEG and EMG signals classification and proposes a novel decision-level multisensor fusion technique to integrate EEG signals with EMG signals. This system retrieves effective information from both sources to understand and predict the desire of the user, and thus aid. By testing out the proposed technique on a publicly available WAY-EEG-GAL dataset, which contains EEG and EMG signals that were recorded simultaneously, we manage to conclude the feasibility and effectiveness of the novel system.

Zero-Shot ECG Classification with Multimodal Learning and Test-time Clinical Knowledge Enhancement

Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are non-invasive diagnostic tools crucial for detecting cardiac arrhythmic diseases in clinical practice. While ECG Self-supervised Learning (eSSL) methods show promise in representation learning from unannotated ECG data, they often overlook the clinical knowledge that can be found in reports. This oversight and the requirement for annotated samples for downstream tasks limit eSSL's versatility. In this work, we address these issues with the Multimodal ECG Representation Learning (MERL}) framework. Through multimodal learning on ECG records and associated reports, MERL is capable of performing zero-shot ECG classification with text prompts, eliminating the need for training data in downstream tasks. At test time, we propose the Clinical Knowledge Enhanced Prompt Engineering (CKEPE) approach, which uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to exploit external expert-verified clinical knowledge databases, generating more descriptive prompts and reducing hallucinations in LLM-generated content to boost zero-shot classification. Based on MERL, we perform the first benchmark across six public ECG datasets, showing the superior performance of MERL compared against eSSL methods. Notably, MERL achieves an average AUC score of 75.2% in zero-shot classification (without training data), 3.2% higher than linear probed eSSL methods with 10\% annotated training data, averaged across all six datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/cheliu-computation/MERL

hvEEGNet: exploiting hierarchical VAEs on EEG data for neuroscience applications

With the recent success of artificial intelligence in neuroscience, a number of deep learning (DL) models were proposed for classification, anomaly detection, and pattern recognition tasks in electroencephalography (EEG). EEG is a multi-channel time-series that provides information about the individual brain activity for diagnostics, neuro-rehabilitation, and other applications (including emotions recognition). Two main issues challenge the existing DL-based modeling methods for EEG: the high variability between subjects and the low signal-to-noise ratio making it difficult to ensure a good quality in the EEG data. In this paper, we propose two variational autoencoder models, namely vEEGNet-ver3 and hvEEGNet, to target the problem of high-fidelity EEG reconstruction. We properly designed their architectures using the blocks of the well-known EEGNet as the encoder, and proposed a loss function based on dynamic time warping. We tested the models on the public Dataset 2a - BCI Competition IV, where EEG was collected from 9 subjects and 22 channels. hvEEGNet was found to reconstruct the EEG data with very high-fidelity, outperforming most previous solutions (including our vEEGNet-ver3 ). Furthermore, this was consistent across all subjects. Interestingly, hvEEGNet made it possible to discover that this popular dataset includes a number of corrupted EEG recordings that might have influenced previous literature results. We also investigated the training behaviour of our models and related it with the quality and the size of the input EEG dataset, aiming at opening a new research debate on this relationship. In the future, hvEEGNet could be used as anomaly (e.g., artefact) detector in large EEG datasets to support the domain experts, but also the latent representations it provides could be used in other classification problems and EEG data generation.

Geometric Machine Learning on EEG Signals

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer transformative potential, but decoding neural signals presents significant challenges. The core premise of this paper is built around demonstrating methods to elucidate the underlying low-dimensional geometric structure present in high-dimensional brainwave data in order to assist in downstream BCI-related neural classification tasks. We demonstrate two pipelines related to electroencephalography (EEG) signal processing: (1) a preliminary pipeline removing noise from individual EEG channels, and (2) a downstream manifold learning pipeline uncovering geometric structure across networks of EEG channels. We conduct preliminary validation using two EEG datasets and situate our demonstration in the context of the BCI-relevant imagined digit decoding problem. Our preliminary pipeline uses an attention-based EEG filtration network to extract clean signal from individual EEG channels. Our primary pipeline uses a fast Fourier transform, a Laplacian eigenmap, a discrete analog of Ricci flow via Ollivier's notion of Ricci curvature, and a graph convolutional network to perform dimensionality reduction on high-dimensional multi-channel EEG data in order to enable regularizable downstream classification. Our system achieves competitive performance with existing signal processing and classification benchmarks; we demonstrate a mean test correlation coefficient of >0.95 at 2 dB on semi-synthetic neural denoising and a downstream EEG-based classification accuracy of 0.97 on distinguishing digit- versus non-digit- thoughts. Results are preliminary and our geometric machine learning pipeline should be validated by more extensive follow-up studies; generalizing these results to larger inter-subject sample sizes, different hardware systems, and broader use cases will be crucial.

Multimodal Sleep Stage and Sleep Apnea Classification Using Vision Transformer: A Multitask Explainable Learning Approach

Sleep is an essential component of human physiology, contributing significantly to overall health and quality of life. Accurate sleep staging and disorder detection are crucial for assessing sleep quality. Studies in the literature have proposed PSG-based approaches and machine-learning methods utilizing single-modality signals. However, existing methods often lack multimodal, multilabel frameworks and address sleep stages and disorders classification separately. In this paper, we propose a 1D-Vision Transformer for simultaneous classification of sleep stages and sleep disorders. Our method exploits the sleep disorders' correlation with specific sleep stage patterns and performs a simultaneous identification of a sleep stage and sleep disorder. The model is trained and tested using multimodal-multilabel sensory data (including photoplethysmogram, respiratory flow, and respiratory effort signals). The proposed method shows an overall accuracy (cohen's Kappa) of 78% (0.66) for five-stage sleep classification and 74% (0.58) for sleep apnea classification. Moreover, we analyzed the encoder attention weights to clarify our models' predictions and investigate the influence different features have on the models' outputs. The result shows that identified patterns, such as respiratory troughs and peaks, make a higher contribution to the final classification process.

SSVEP-Based BCI Wheelchair Control System

A brain-computer interface (BCI) is a system that allows a person to communicate or control the surroundings without depending on the brain's normal output pathways of peripheral nerves and muscles. A lot of successful applications have arisen utilizing the advantages of BCI to assist disabled people with so-called assistive technology. Considering using BCI has fewer limitations and huge potential, this project has been proposed to control the movement of an electronic wheelchair via brain signals. The goal of this project is to help disabled people, especially paralyzed people suffering from motor disabilities, improve their life qualities. In order to realize the project stated above, Steady-State Visual Evoked Potential (SSVEP) is involved. It can be easily elicited in the visual cortical with the same frequency as the one is being focused by the subject. There are two important parts in this project. One is to process the EEG signals and another one is to make a visual stimulator using hardware. The EEG signals are processed in Matlab using the algorithm of Butterworth Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) bandpass filter (for preprocessing) and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) (for feature extraction). Besides, a harmonics-based classification method is proposed and applied in the classification part. Moreover, the design of the visual stimulator combines LEDs as flickers and LCDs as information displayers on one panel. Microcontrollers are employed to control the SSVEP visual stimuli panel. This project is evaluated by subjects with different races and ages. Experimental results show the system is easy to be operated and it can achieve approximately a minimum 1-second time delay. So it demonstrates that this SSVEP-based BCI-controlled wheelchair has a huge potential to be applied to disabled people in the future.

Protecting Intellectual Property of EEG-based Neural Networks with Watermarking

EEG-based neural networks, pivotal in medical diagnosis and brain-computer interfaces, face significant intellectual property (IP) risks due to their reliance on sensitive neurophysiological data and resource-intensive development. Current watermarking methods, particularly those using abstract trigger sets, lack robust authentication and fail to address the unique challenges of EEG models. This paper introduces a cryptographic wonder filter-based watermarking framework tailored for EEG-based neural networks. Leveraging collision-resistant hashing and public-key encryption, the wonder filter embeds the watermark during training, ensuring minimal distortion (leq 5% drop in EEG task accuracy) and high reliability (100\% watermark detection). The framework is rigorously evaluated against adversarial attacks, including fine-tuning, transfer learning, and neuron pruning. Results demonstrate persistent watermark retention, with classification accuracy for watermarked states remaining above 90\% even after aggressive pruning, while primary task performance degrades faster, deterring removal attempts. Piracy resistance is validated by the inability to embed secondary watermarks without severe accuracy loss ( >10% in EEGNet and CCNN models). Cryptographic hashing ensures authentication, reducing brute-force attack success probabilities. Evaluated on the DEAP dataset across models (CCNN, EEGNet, TSception), the method achieves >99.4% null-embedding accuracy, effectively eliminating false positives. By integrating wonder filters with EEG-specific adaptations, this work bridges a critical gap in IP protection for neurophysiological models, offering a secure, tamper-proof solution for healthcare and biometric applications. The framework's robustness against adversarial modifications underscores its potential to safeguard sensitive EEG models while maintaining diagnostic utility.

AGTCNet: A Graph-Temporal Approach for Principled Motor Imagery EEG Classification

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology utilizing electroencephalography (EEG) marks a transformative innovation, empowering motor-impaired individuals to engage with their environment on equal footing. Despite its promising potential, developing subject-invariant and session-invariant BCI systems remains a significant challenge due to the inherent complexity and variability of neural activity across individuals and over time, compounded by EEG hardware constraints. While prior studies have sought to develop robust BCI systems, existing approaches remain ineffective in capturing the intricate spatiotemporal dependencies within multichannel EEG signals. This study addresses this gap by introducing the attentive graph-temporal convolutional network (AGTCNet), a novel graph-temporal model for motor imagery EEG (MI-EEG) classification. Specifically, AGTCNet leverages the topographic configuration of EEG electrodes as an inductive bias and integrates graph convolutional attention network (GCAT) to jointly learn expressive spatiotemporal EEG representations. The proposed model significantly outperformed existing MI-EEG classifiers, achieving state-of-the-art performance while utilizing a compact architecture, underscoring its effectiveness and practicality for BCI deployment. With a 49.87% reduction in model size, 64.65% faster inference time, and shorter input EEG signal, AGTCNet achieved a moving average accuracy of 66.82% for subject-independent classification on the BCI Competition IV Dataset 2a, which further improved to 82.88% when fine-tuned for subject-specific classification. On the EEG Motor Movement/Imagery Dataset, AGTCNet achieved moving average accuracies of 64.14% and 85.22% for 4-class and 2-class subject-independent classifications, respectively, with further improvements to 72.13% and 90.54% for subject-specific classifications.

MODMA dataset: a Multi-modal Open Dataset for Mental-disorder Analysis

According to the World Health Organization, the number of mental disorder patients, especially depression patients, has grown rapidly and become a leading contributor to the global burden of disease. However, the present common practice of depression diagnosis is based on interviews and clinical scales carried out by doctors, which is not only labor-consuming but also time-consuming. One important reason is due to the lack of physiological indicators for mental disorders. With the rising of tools such as data mining and artificial intelligence, using physiological data to explore new possible physiological indicators of mental disorder and creating new applications for mental disorder diagnosis has become a new research hot topic. However, good quality physiological data for mental disorder patients are hard to acquire. We present a multi-modal open dataset for mental-disorder analysis. The dataset includes EEG and audio data from clinically depressed patients and matching normal controls. All our patients were carefully diagnosed and selected by professional psychiatrists in hospitals. The EEG dataset includes not only data collected using traditional 128-electrodes mounted elastic cap, but also a novel wearable 3-electrode EEG collector for pervasive applications. The 128-electrodes EEG signals of 53 subjects were recorded as both in resting state and under stimulation; the 3-electrode EEG signals of 55 subjects were recorded in resting state; the audio data of 52 subjects were recorded during interviewing, reading, and picture description. We encourage other researchers in the field to use it for testing their methods of mental-disorder analysis.

A Deep Neural Network for SSVEP-based Brain-Computer Interfaces

Objective: Target identification in brain-computer interface (BCI) spellers refers to the electroencephalogram (EEG) classification for predicting the target character that the subject intends to spell. When the visual stimulus of each character is tagged with a distinct frequency, the EEG records steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEP) whose spectrum is dominated by the harmonics of the target frequency. In this setting, we address the target identification and propose a novel deep neural network (DNN) architecture. Method: The proposed DNN processes the multi-channel SSVEP with convolutions across the sub-bands of harmonics, channels, time, and classifies at the fully connected layer. We test with two publicly available large scale (the benchmark and BETA) datasets consisting of in total 105 subjects with 40 characters. Our first stage training learns a global model by exploiting the statistical commonalities among all subjects, and the second stage fine tunes to each subject separately by exploiting the individualities. Results: Our DNN achieves impressive information transfer rates (ITRs) on both datasets, 265.23 bits/min and 196.59 bits/min, respectively, with only 0.4 seconds of stimulation. The code is available for reproducibility at https://github.com/osmanberke/Deep-SSVEP-BCI. Conclusion: The presented DNN strongly outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques as our accuracy and ITR rates are the highest ever reported performance results on these datasets. Significance: Due to its unprecedentedly high speller ITRs and flawless applicability to general SSVEP systems, our technique has great potential in various biomedical engineering settings of BCIs such as communication, rehabilitation and control.

NeuroNet: A Novel Hybrid Self-Supervised Learning Framework for Sleep Stage Classification Using Single-Channel EEG

The classification of sleep stages is a pivotal aspect of diagnosing sleep disorders and evaluating sleep quality. However, the conventional manual scoring process, conducted by clinicians, is time-consuming and prone to human bias. Recent advancements in deep learning have substantially propelled the automation of sleep stage classification. Nevertheless, challenges persist, including the need for large datasets with labels and the inherent biases in human-generated annotations. This paper introduces NeuroNet, a self-supervised learning (SSL) framework designed to effectively harness unlabeled single-channel sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) signals by integrating contrastive learning tasks and masked prediction tasks. NeuroNet demonstrates superior performance over existing SSL methodologies through extensive experimentation conducted across three polysomnography (PSG) datasets. Additionally, this study proposes a Mamba-based temporal context module to capture the relationships among diverse EEG epochs. Combining NeuroNet with the Mamba-based temporal context module has demonstrated the capability to achieve, or even surpass, the performance of the latest supervised learning methodologies, even with a limited amount of labeled data. This study is expected to establish a new benchmark in sleep stage classification, promising to guide future research and applications in the field of sleep analysis.

Deep Learning Models for Arrhythmia Classification Using Stacked Time-frequency Scalogram Images from ECG Signals

Electrocardiograms (ECGs), a medical monitoring technology recording cardiac activity, are widely used for diagnosing cardiac arrhythmia. The diagnosis is based on the analysis of the deformation of the signal shapes due to irregular heart rates associated with heart diseases. Due to the infeasibility of manual examination of large volumes of ECG data, this paper aims to propose an automated AI based system for ECG-based arrhythmia classification. To this front, a deep learning based solution has been proposed for ECG-based arrhythmia classification. Twelve lead electrocardiograms (ECG) of length 10 sec from 45, 152 individuals from Shaoxing People's Hospital (SPH) dataset from PhysioNet with four different types of arrhythmias were used. The sampling frequency utilized was 500 Hz. Median filtering was used to preprocess the ECG signals. For every 1 sec of ECG signal, the time-frequency (TF) scalogram was estimated and stacked row wise to obtain a single image from 12 channels, resulting in 10 stacked TF scalograms for each ECG signal. These stacked TF scalograms are fed to the pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN), 1D CNN, and 1D CNN-LSTM (Long short-term memory) models, for arrhythmia classification. The fine-tuned CNN models obtained the best test accuracy of about 98% followed by 95% test accuracy by basic CNN-LSTM in arrhythmia classification.

Visual Decoding and Reconstruction via EEG Embeddings with Guided Diffusion

How to decode human vision through neural signals has attracted a long-standing interest in neuroscience and machine learning. Modern contrastive learning and generative models improved the performance of fMRI-based visual decoding and reconstruction. However, the high cost and low temporal resolution of fMRI limit their applications in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), prompting a high need for EEG-based visual reconstruction. In this study, we present an EEG-based visual reconstruction framework. It consists of a plug-and-play EEG encoder called the Adaptive Thinking Mapper (ATM), which is aligned with image embeddings, and a two-stage EEG guidance image generator that first transforms EEG features into image priors and then reconstructs the visual stimuli with a pre-trained image generator. Our approach allows EEG embeddings to achieve superior performance in image classification and retrieval tasks. Our two-stage image generation strategy vividly reconstructs images seen by humans. Furthermore, we analyzed the impact of signals from different time windows and brain regions on decoding and reconstruction. The versatility of our framework is demonstrated in the magnetoencephalogram (MEG) data modality. We report that EEG-based visual decoding achieves SOTA performance, highlighting the portability, low cost, and high temporal resolution of EEG, enabling a wide range of BCI applications. The code of ATM is available at https://github.com/dongyangli-del/EEG_Image_decode.

Self-Supervised Pre-Training with Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture Boosts ECG Classification Performance

Accurate diagnosis of heart arrhythmias requires the interpretation of electrocardiograms (ECG), which capture the electrical activity of the heart. Automating this process through machine learning is challenging due to the need for large annotated datasets, which are difficult and costly to collect. To address this issue, transfer learning is often employed, where models are pre-trained on large datasets and fine-tuned for specific ECG classification tasks with limited labeled data. Self-supervised learning has become a widely adopted pre-training method, enabling models to learn meaningful representations from unlabeled datasets. In this work, we explore the joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) for self-supervised learning from ECG data. Unlike invariance-based methods, JEPA does not rely on hand-crafted data augmentations, and unlike generative methods, it predicts latent features rather than reconstructing input data. We create a large unsupervised pre-training dataset by combining ten public ECG databases, amounting to over one million records. We pre-train Vision Transformers using JEPA on this dataset and fine-tune them on various PTB-XL benchmarks. Our results show that JEPA outperforms existing invariance-based and generative approaches, achieving an AUC of 0.945 on the PTB-XL all statements task. JEPA consistently learns the highest quality representations, as demonstrated in linear evaluations, and proves advantageous for pre-training even in the absence of additional data.

Classification of BCI-EEG based on augmented covariance matrix

Objective: Electroencephalography signals are recorded as a multidimensional dataset. We propose a new framework based on the augmented covariance extracted from an autoregressive model to improve motor imagery classification. Methods: From the autoregressive model can be derived the Yule-Walker equations, which show the emergence of a symmetric positive definite matrix: the augmented covariance matrix. The state-of the art for classifying covariance matrices is based on Riemannian Geometry. A fairly natural idea is therefore to extend the standard approach using these augmented covariance matrices. The methodology for creating the augmented covariance matrix shows a natural connection with the delay embedding theorem proposed by Takens for dynamical systems. Such an embedding method is based on the knowledge of two parameters: the delay and the embedding dimension, respectively related to the lag and the order of the autoregressive model. This approach provides new methods to compute the hyper-parameters in addition to standard grid search. Results: The augmented covariance matrix performed noticeably better than any state-of-the-art methods. We will test our approach on several datasets and several subjects using the MOABB framework, using both within-session and cross-session evaluation. Conclusion: The improvement in results is due to the fact that the augmented covariance matrix incorporates not only spatial but also temporal information, incorporating nonlinear components of the signal through an embedding procedure, which allows the leveraging of dynamical systems algorithms. Significance: These results extend the concepts and the results of the Riemannian distance based classification algorithm.

LiPCoT: Linear Predictive Coding based Tokenizer for Self-supervised Learning of Time Series Data via Language Models

Language models have achieved remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks. However, their application to time series data, a crucial component in many domains, remains limited. This paper proposes LiPCoT (Linear Predictive Coding based Tokenizer for time series), a novel tokenizer that encodes time series data into a sequence of tokens, enabling self-supervised learning of time series using existing Language model architectures such as BERT. Unlike traditional time series tokenizers that rely heavily on CNN encoder for time series feature generation, LiPCoT employs stochastic modeling through linear predictive coding to create a latent space for time series providing a compact yet rich representation of the inherent stochastic nature of the data. Furthermore, LiPCoT is computationally efficient and can effectively handle time series data with varying sampling rates and lengths, overcoming common limitations of existing time series tokenizers. In this proof-of-concept work, we present the effectiveness of LiPCoT in classifying Parkinson's disease (PD) using an EEG dataset from 46 participants. In particular, we utilize LiPCoT to encode EEG data into a small vocabulary of tokens and then use BERT for self-supervised learning and the downstream task of PD classification. We benchmark our approach against several state-of-the-art CNN-based deep learning architectures for PD detection. Our results reveal that BERT models utilizing self-supervised learning outperformed the best-performing existing method by 7.1% in precision, 2.3% in recall, 5.5% in accuracy, 4% in AUC, and 5% in F1-score highlighting the potential for self-supervised learning even on small datasets. Our work will inform future foundational models for time series, particularly for self-supervised learning.

Pseudo-online framework for BCI evaluation: A MOABB perspective

Objective: BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) technology operates in three modes: online, offline, and pseudo-online. In the online mode, real-time EEG data is constantly analyzed. In offline mode, the signal is acquired and processed afterwards. The pseudo-online mode processes collected data as if they were received in real-time. The main difference is that the offline mode often analyzes the whole data, while the online and pseudo-online modes only analyze data in short time windows. Offline analysis is usually done with asynchronous BCIs, which restricts analysis to predefined time windows. Asynchronous BCI, compatible with online and pseudo-online modes, allows flexible mental activity duration. Offline processing tends to be more accurate, while online analysis is better for therapeutic applications. Pseudo-online implementation approximates online processing without real-time constraints. Many BCI studies being offline introduce biases compared to real-life scenarios, impacting classification algorithm performance. Approach: The objective of this research paper is therefore to extend the current MOABB framework, operating in offline mode, so as to allow a comparison of different algorithms in a pseudo-online setting with the use of a technology based on overlapping sliding windows. To do this will require the introduction of a idle state event in the dataset that takes into account all different possibilities that are not task thinking. To validate the performance of the algorithms we will use the normalized Matthews Correlation Coefficient (nMCC) and the Information Transfer Rate (ITR). Main results: We analyzed the state-of-the-art algorithms of the last 15 years over several Motor Imagery (MI) datasets composed by several subjects, showing the differences between the two approaches from a statistical point of view. Significance: The ability to analyze the performance of different algorithms in offline and pseudo-online modes will allow the BCI community to obtain more accurate and comprehensive reports regarding the performance of classification algorithms.

Learning Interpretable Representations Leads to Semantically Faithful EEG-to-Text Generation

Pretrained generative models have opened new frontiers in brain decoding by enabling the synthesis of realistic texts and images from non-invasive brain recordings. However, the reliability of such outputs remains questionable--whether they truly reflect semantic activation in the brain, or are merely hallucinated by the powerful generative models. In this paper, we focus on EEG-to-text decoding and address its hallucination issue through the lens of posterior collapse. Acknowledging the underlying mismatch in information capacity between EEG and text, we reframe the decoding task as semantic summarization of core meanings rather than previously verbatim reconstruction of stimulus texts. To this end, we propose the Generative Language Inspection Model (GLIM), which emphasizes learning informative and interpretable EEG representations to improve semantic grounding under heterogeneous and small-scale data conditions. Experiments on the public ZuCo dataset demonstrate that GLIM consistently generates fluent, EEG-grounded sentences without teacher forcing. Moreover, it supports more robust evaluation beyond text similarity, through EEG-text retrieval and zero-shot semantic classification across sentiment categories, relation types, and corpus topics. Together, our architecture and evaluation protocols lay the foundation for reliable and scalable benchmarking in generative brain decoding.

Anomaly Detection using Autoencoders in High Performance Computing Systems

Anomaly detection in supercomputers is a very difficult problem due to the big scale of the systems and the high number of components. The current state of the art for automated anomaly detection employs Machine Learning methods or statistical regression models in a supervised fashion, meaning that the detection tool is trained to distinguish among a fixed set of behaviour classes (healthy and unhealthy states). We propose a novel approach for anomaly detection in High Performance Computing systems based on a Machine (Deep) Learning technique, namely a type of neural network called autoencoder. The key idea is to train a set of autoencoders to learn the normal (healthy) behaviour of the supercomputer nodes and, after training, use them to identify abnormal conditions. This is different from previous approaches which where based on learning the abnormal condition, for which there are much smaller datasets (since it is very hard to identify them to begin with). We test our approach on a real supercomputer equipped with a fine-grained, scalable monitoring infrastructure that can provide large amount of data to characterize the system behaviour. The results are extremely promising: after the training phase to learn the normal system behaviour, our method is capable of detecting anomalies that have never been seen before with a very good accuracy (values ranging between 88% and 96%).

GEM: Empowering MLLM for Grounded ECG Understanding with Time Series and Images

While recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced automated ECG interpretation, they still face two key limitations: (1) insufficient multimodal synergy between time series signals and visual ECG representations, and (2) limited explainability in linking diagnoses to granular waveform evidence. We introduce GEM, the first MLLM unifying ECG time series, 12-lead ECG images and text for grounded and clinician-aligned ECG interpretation. GEM enables feature-grounded analysis, evidence-driven reasoning, and a clinician-like diagnostic process through three core innovations: a dual-encoder framework extracting complementary time series and image features, cross-modal alignment for effective multimodal understanding, and knowledge-guided instruction generation for generating high-granularity grounding data (ECG-Grounding) linking diagnoses to measurable parameters (e.g., QRS/PR Intervals). Additionally, we propose the Grounded ECG Understanding task, a clinically motivated benchmark designed to comprehensively assess the MLLM's capability in grounded ECG understanding. Experimental results on both existing and our proposed benchmarks show GEM significantly improves predictive performance (CSN 7.4% uparrow), explainability (22.7% uparrow), and grounding (24.8% uparrow), making it more suitable for real-world clinical applications. GitHub repository: https://github.com/lanxiang1017/GEM.git

HappyFeat -- An interactive and efficient BCI framework for clinical applications

Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) systems allow users to perform actions by translating their brain activity into commands. Such systems usually need a training phase, consisting in training a classification algorithm to discriminate between mental states using specific features from the recorded signals. This phase of feature selection and training is crucial for BCI performance and presents specific constraints to be met in a clinical context, such as post-stroke rehabilitation. In this paper, we present HappyFeat, a software making Motor Imagery (MI) based BCI experiments easier, by gathering all necessary manipulations and analysis in a single convenient GUI and via automation of experiment or analysis parameters. The resulting workflow allows for effortlessly selecting the best features, helping to achieve good BCI performance in time-constrained environments. Alternative features based on Functional Connectivity can be used and compared or combined with Power Spectral Density, allowing a network-oriented approach. We then give details of HappyFeat's main mechanisms, and a review of its performances in typical use cases. We also show that it can be used as an efficient tool for comparing different metrics extracted from the signals, to train the classification algorithm. To this end, we show a comparison between the commonly-used Power Spectral Density and network metrics based on Functional Connectivity. HappyFeat is available as an open-source project which can be freely downloaded on GitHub.

CE-SSL: Computation-Efficient Semi-Supervised Learning for ECG-based Cardiovascular Diseases Detection

The label scarcity problem is the main challenge that hinders the wide application of deep learning systems in automatic cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) detection using electrocardiography (ECG). Tuning pre-trained models alleviates this problem by transferring knowledge learned from large datasets to downstream small datasets. However, bottlenecks in computational efficiency and detection performance limit its clinical applications. It is difficult to improve the detection performance without significantly sacrificing the computational efficiency during model training. Here, we propose a computation-efficient semi-supervised learning paradigm (CE-SSL) for robust and computation-efficient CVDs detection using ECG. It enables a robust adaptation of pre-trained models on downstream datasets with limited supervision and high computational efficiency. First, a random-deactivation technique is developed to achieve robust and fast low-rank adaptation of pre-trained weights. Subsequently, we propose a one-shot rank allocation module to determine the optimal ranks for the update matrices of the pre-trained weights. Finally, a lightweight semi-supervised learning pipeline is introduced to enhance model performance by leveraging labeled and unlabeled data with high computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on four downstream datasets demonstrate that CE-SSL not only outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in multi-label CVDs detection but also consumes fewer GPU footprints, training time, and parameter storage space. As such, this paradigm provides an effective solution for achieving high computational efficiency and robust detection performance in the clinical applications of pre-trained models under limited supervision. Code and Supplementary Materials are available at https://github.com/KAZABANA/CE-SSL

Face Detection in the Operating Room: Comparison of State-of-the-art Methods and a Self-supervised Approach

Purpose: Face detection is a needed component for the automatic analysis and assistance of human activities during surgical procedures. Efficient face detection algorithms can indeed help to detect and identify the persons present in the room, and also be used to automatically anonymize the data. However, current algorithms trained on natural images do not generalize well to the operating room (OR) images. In this work, we provide a comparison of state-of-the-art face detectors on OR data and also present an approach to train a face detector for the OR by exploiting non-annotated OR images. Methods: We propose a comparison of 6 state-of-the-art face detectors on clinical data using Multi-View Operating Room Faces (MVOR-Faces), a dataset of operating room images capturing real surgical activities. We then propose to use self-supervision, a domain adaptation method, for the task of face detection in the OR. The approach makes use of non-annotated images to fine-tune a state-of-the-art detector for the OR without using any human supervision. Results: The results show that the best model, namely the tiny face detector, yields an average precision of 0.536 at Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.5. Our self-supervised model using non-annotated clinical data outperforms this result by 9.2%. Conclusion: We present the first comparison of state-of-the-art face detectors on operating room images and show that results can be significantly improved by using self-supervision on non-annotated data.

Removing Neural Signal Artifacts with Autoencoder-Targeted Adversarial Transformers (AT-AT)

Electromyogenic (EMG) noise is a major contamination source in EEG data that can impede accurate analysis of brain-specific neural activity. Recent literature on EMG artifact removal has moved beyond traditional linear algorithms in favor of machine learning-based systems. However, existing deep learning-based filtration methods often have large compute footprints and prohibitively long training times. In this study, we present a new machine learning-based system for filtering EMG interference from EEG data using an autoencoder-targeted adversarial transformer (AT-AT). By leveraging the lightweight expressivity of an autoencoder to determine optimal time-series transformer application sites, our AT-AT architecture achieves a >90% model size reduction compared to published artifact removal models. The addition of adversarial training ensures that filtered signals adhere to the fundamental characteristics of EEG data. We trained AT-AT using published neural data from 67 subjects and found that the system was able to achieve comparable test performance to larger models; AT-AT posted a mean reconstructive correlation coefficient above 0.95 at an initial signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 2 dB and 0.70 at -7 dB SNR. Further research generalizing these results to broader sample sizes beyond these isolated test cases will be crucial; while outside the scope of this study, we also include results from a real-world deployment of AT-AT in the Appendix.

DDXPlus: A New Dataset For Automatic Medical Diagnosis

There has been a rapidly growing interest in Automatic Symptom Detection (ASD) and Automatic Diagnosis (AD) systems in the machine learning research literature, aiming to assist doctors in telemedicine services. These systems are designed to interact with patients, collect evidence about their symptoms and relevant antecedents, and possibly make predictions about the underlying diseases. Doctors would review the interactions, including the evidence and the predictions, collect if necessary additional information from patients, before deciding on next steps. Despite recent progress in this area, an important piece of doctors' interactions with patients is missing in the design of these systems, namely the differential diagnosis. Its absence is largely due to the lack of datasets that include such information for models to train on. In this work, we present a large-scale synthetic dataset of roughly 1.3 million patients that includes a differential diagnosis, along with the ground truth pathology, symptoms and antecedents for each patient. Unlike existing datasets which only contain binary symptoms and antecedents, this dataset also contains categorical and multi-choice symptoms and antecedents useful for efficient data collection. Moreover, some symptoms are organized in a hierarchy, making it possible to design systems able to interact with patients in a logical way. As a proof-of-concept, we extend two existing AD and ASD systems to incorporate the differential diagnosis, and provide empirical evidence that using differentials as training signals is essential for the efficiency of such systems or for helping doctors better understand the reasoning of those systems.

Aggregating Intrinsic Information to Enhance BCI Performance through Federated Learning

Insufficient data is a long-standing challenge for Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) to build a high-performance deep learning model. Though numerous research groups and institutes collect a multitude of EEG datasets for the same BCI task, sharing EEG data from multiple sites is still challenging due to the heterogeneity of devices. The significance of this challenge cannot be overstated, given the critical role of data diversity in fostering model robustness. However, existing works rarely discuss this issue, predominantly centering their attention on model training within a single dataset, often in the context of inter-subject or inter-session settings. In this work, we propose a hierarchical personalized Federated Learning EEG decoding (FLEEG) framework to surmount this challenge. This innovative framework heralds a new learning paradigm for BCI, enabling datasets with disparate data formats to collaborate in the model training process. Each client is assigned a specific dataset and trains a hierarchical personalized model to manage diverse data formats and facilitate information exchange. Meanwhile, the server coordinates the training procedure to harness knowledge gleaned from all datasets, thus elevating overall performance. The framework has been evaluated in Motor Imagery (MI) classification with nine EEG datasets collected by different devices but implementing the same MI task. Results demonstrate that the proposed frame can boost classification performance up to 16.7% by enabling knowledge sharing between multiple datasets, especially for smaller datasets. Visualization results also indicate that the proposed framework can empower the local models to put a stable focus on task-related areas, yielding better performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end solution to address this important challenge.

ECGNet: A generative adversarial network (GAN) approach to the synthesis of 12-lead ECG signals from single lead inputs

Electrocardiography (ECG) signal generation has been heavily explored using generative adversarial networks (GAN) because the implementation of 12-lead ECGs is not always feasible. The GAN models have achieved remarkable results in reproducing ECG signals but are only designed for multiple lead inputs and the features the GAN model preserves have not been identified-limiting the generated signals use in cardiovascular disease (CVD)-predictive models. This paper presents ECGNet which is a procedure that generates a complete set of 12-lead ECG signals from any single lead input using a GAN framework with a bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) generator and a convolutional neural network (CNN) discriminator. Cross and auto-correlation analysis performed on the generated signals identifies features conserved during the signal generation-i.e., features that can characterize the unique-nature of each signal and thus likely indicators of CVD. Finally, by using ECG signals annotated with the CVD-indicative features detailed by the correlation analysis as inputs for a CVD-onset-predictive CNN model, we overcome challenges preventing the prediction of multiple-CVD targets. Our models are experimented on 15s 12-lead ECG dataset recorded using MyoVista's wavECG. Functional outcome data for each patient is recorded and used in the CVD-predictive model. Our best GAN model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with Frechet Distance (FD) scores of 4.73, 4.89, 5.18, 4.77, 4.71, and 5.55 on the V1-V6 pre-cordial leads respectively and shows strength in preserving the P-Q segments and R-peaks in the generated signals. To the best of our knowledge, ECGNet is the first to predict all of the remaining eleven leads from the input of any single lead.

Large-scale Training of Foundation Models for Wearable Biosignals

Tracking biosignals is crucial for monitoring wellness and preempting the development of severe medical conditions. Today, wearable devices can conveniently record various biosignals, creating the opportunity to monitor health status without disruption to one's daily routine. Despite widespread use of wearable devices and existing digital biomarkers, the absence of curated data with annotated medical labels hinders the development of new biomarkers to measure common health conditions. In fact, medical datasets are usually small in comparison to other domains, which is an obstacle for developing neural network models for biosignals. To address this challenge, we have employed self-supervised learning using the unlabeled sensor data collected under informed consent from the large longitudinal Apple Heart and Movement Study (AHMS) to train foundation models for two common biosignals: photoplethysmography (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) recorded on Apple Watch. We curated PPG and ECG datasets from AHMS that include data from ~141K participants spanning ~3 years. Our self-supervised learning framework includes participant level positive pair selection, stochastic augmentation module and a regularized contrastive loss optimized with momentum training, and generalizes well to both PPG and ECG modalities. We show that the pre-trained foundation models readily encode information regarding participants' demographics and health conditions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that builds foundation models using large-scale PPG and ECG data collected via wearable consumer devices x2013 prior works have commonly used smaller-size datasets collected in clinical and experimental settings. We believe PPG and ECG foundation models can enhance future wearable devices by reducing the reliance on labeled data and hold the potential to help the users improve their health.

Decoding speech from non-invasive brain recordings

Decoding language from brain activity is a long-awaited goal in both healthcare and neuroscience. Major milestones have recently been reached thanks to intracranial devices: subject-specific pipelines trained on invasive brain responses to basic language tasks now start to efficiently decode interpretable features (e.g. letters, words, spectrograms). However, scaling this approach to natural speech and non-invasive brain recordings remains a major challenge. Here, we propose a single end-to-end architecture trained with contrastive learning across a large cohort of individuals to predict self-supervised representations of natural speech. We evaluate our model on four public datasets, encompassing 169 volunteers recorded with magneto- or electro-encephalography (M/EEG), while they listened to natural speech. The results show that our model can identify, from 3s of MEG signals, the corresponding speech segment with up to 72.5% top-10 accuracy out of 1,594 distinct segments (and 44% top-1 accuracy), and up to 19.1% out of 2,604 segments for EEG recordings -- hence allowing the decoding of phrases absent from the training set. Model comparison and ablation analyses show that these performances directly benefit from our original design choices, namely the use of (i) a contrastive objective, (ii) pretrained representations of speech and (iii) a common convolutional architecture simultaneously trained across several participants. Together, these results delineate a promising path to decode natural language processing in real time from non-invasive recordings of brain activity.

Learning heterogeneous delays in a layer of spiking neurons for fast motion detection

The precise timing of spikes emitted by neurons plays a crucial role in shaping the response of efferent biological neurons. This temporal dimension of neural activity holds significant importance in understanding information processing in neurobiology, especially for the performance of neuromorphic hardware, such as event-based cameras. Nonetheless, many artificial neural models disregard this critical temporal dimension of neural activity. In this study, we present a model designed to efficiently detect temporal spiking motifs using a layer of spiking neurons equipped with heterogeneous synaptic delays. Our model capitalizes on the diverse synaptic delays present on the dendritic tree, enabling specific arrangements of temporally precise synaptic inputs to synchronize upon reaching the basal dendritic tree. We formalize this process as a time-invariant logistic regression, which can be trained using labeled data. To demonstrate its practical efficacy, we apply the model to naturalistic videos transformed into event streams, simulating the output of the biological retina or event-based cameras. To evaluate the robustness of the model in detecting visual motion, we conduct experiments by selectively pruning weights and demonstrate that the model remains efficient even under significantly reduced workloads. In conclusion, by providing a comprehensive, event-driven computational building block, the incorporation of heterogeneous delays has the potential to greatly improve the performance of future spiking neural network algorithms, particularly in the context of neuromorphic chips.

Nigerian Schizophrenia EEG Dataset (NSzED) Towards Data-Driven Psychiatry in Africa

This work has been carried out to improve the dearth of high-quality EEG datasets used for schizophrenia diagnostic tools development and studies from populations of developing and underdeveloped regions of the world. To this aim, the presented dataset contains international 10/20 system EEG recordings from West African subjects of Nigerian origin in restful states, mental arithmetic task execution states and while passively reacting to auditory stimuli, the first of its kind from the region and continent. The subjects are divided into patients and healthy controls and recorded from 37 patients and 22 healthy control subjects identified by the Mini International Schizophrenia Interview (MINI) and also assessed by the Positive and Negative Symptoms Scale (PANSS) and the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule (WHODAS). All patients are admitted schizophrenia patients of the Mental Health Ward, Medical Outpatient Department of the Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospital Complex (OAUTHC, Ile-Ife) and its subsidiary Wesley Guild Hospital Unit (OAUTHC, Ilesa). Controls are drawn from students and clinicians who volunteered to participate in the study at the Mental Health Ward of OAUTHC and the Wesley Guild Hospital Unit. This dataset is the first version of the Nigerian schizophrenia dataset (NSzED) and can be used by the neuroscience and computational psychiatry research community studying the diagnosis and prognosis of schizophrenia using the electroencephalogram signal modality.

Learning Delays in Spiking Neural Networks using Dilated Convolutions with Learnable Spacings

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are a promising research direction for building power-efficient information processing systems, especially for temporal tasks such as speech recognition. In SNNs, delays refer to the time needed for one spike to travel from one neuron to another. These delays matter because they influence the spike arrival times, and it is well-known that spiking neurons respond more strongly to coincident input spikes. More formally, it has been shown theoretically that plastic delays greatly increase the expressivity in SNNs. Yet, efficient algorithms to learn these delays have been lacking. Here, we propose a new discrete-time algorithm that addresses this issue in deep feedforward SNNs using backpropagation, in an offline manner. To simulate delays between consecutive layers, we use 1D convolutions across time. The kernels contain only a few non-zero weights - one per synapse - whose positions correspond to the delays. These positions are learned together with the weights using the recently proposed Dilated Convolution with Learnable Spacings (DCLS). We evaluated our method on three datasets: the Spiking Heidelberg Dataset (SHD), the Spiking Speech Commands (SSC) and its non-spiking version Google Speech Commands v0.02 (GSC) benchmarks, which require detecting temporal patterns. We used feedforward SNNs with two or three hidden fully connected layers, and vanilla leaky integrate-and-fire neurons. We showed that fixed random delays help and that learning them helps even more. Furthermore, our method outperformed the state-of-the-art in the three datasets without using recurrent connections and with substantially fewer parameters. Our work demonstrates the potential of delay learning in developing accurate and precise models for temporal data processing. Our code is based on PyTorch / SpikingJelly and available at: https://github.com/Thvnvtos/SNN-delays

Hallucination Detox: Sensitive Neuron Dropout (SeND) for Large Language Model Training

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly deployed across various industries, concerns regarding their reliability, particularly due to hallucinations-outputs that are factually inaccurate or irrelevant to user input-have grown. Our research investigates the relationship between the training process and the emergence of hallucinations to address a key gap in existing research that focuses primarily on post hoc detection and mitigation strategies. Using models from the Pythia suite (70M-12B parameters) and several hallucination detection metrics, we analyze hallucination trends throughout training and explore LLM internal dynamics. We introduce SEnsitive Neuron Dropout (SeND), a novel training protocol designed to mitigate hallucinations by reducing variance during training. SeND achieves this by deterministically dropping neurons with significant variability on a dataset, referred to as Sensitive Neurons. In addition, we develop an unsupervised hallucination detection metric, Efficient EigenScore (EES), which approximates the traditional EigenScore in 2x speed. This efficient metric is integrated into our protocol, allowing SeND to be both computationally scalable and effective at reducing hallucinations. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that our approach improves LLM reliability at test time by up to 40% compared to normal training while also providing an efficient method to improve factual accuracy when adapting LLMs to domains such as Wikipedia and Medical datasets.

StRegA: Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Brain MRIs using a Compact Context-encoding Variational Autoencoder

Expert interpretation of anatomical images of the human brain is the central part of neuro-radiology. Several machine learning-based techniques have been proposed to assist in the analysis process. However, the ML models typically need to be trained to perform a specific task, e.g., brain tumour segmentation or classification. Not only do the corresponding training data require laborious manual annotations, but a wide variety of abnormalities can be present in a human brain MRI - even more than one simultaneously, which renders representation of all possible anomalies very challenging. Hence, a possible solution is an unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) system that can learn a data distribution from an unlabelled dataset of healthy subjects and then be applied to detect out of distribution samples. Such a technique can then be used to detect anomalies - lesions or abnormalities, for example, brain tumours, without explicitly training the model for that specific pathology. Several Variational Autoencoder (VAE) based techniques have been proposed in the past for this task. Even though they perform very well on controlled artificially simulated anomalies, many of them perform poorly while detecting anomalies in clinical data. This research proposes a compact version of the "context-encoding" VAE (ceVAE) model, combined with pre and post-processing steps, creating a UAD pipeline (StRegA), which is more robust on clinical data, and shows its applicability in detecting anomalies such as tumours in brain MRIs. The proposed pipeline achieved a Dice score of 0.642pm0.101 while detecting tumours in T2w images of the BraTS dataset and 0.859pm0.112 while detecting artificially induced anomalies, while the best performing baseline achieved 0.522pm0.135 and 0.783pm0.111, respectively.

Large Language Models for Cuffless Blood Pressure Measurement From Wearable Biosignals

Large language models (LLMs) have captured significant interest from both academia and industry due to their impressive performance across various textual tasks. However, the potential of LLMs to analyze physiological time-series data remains an emerging research field. Particularly, there is a notable gap in the utilization of LLMs for analyzing wearable biosignals to achieve cuffless blood pressure (BP) measurement, which is critical for the management of cardiovascular diseases. This paper presents the first work to explore the capacity of LLMs to perform cuffless BP estimation based on wearable biosignals. We extracted physiological features from electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals and designed context-enhanced prompts by combining these features with BP domain knowledge and user information. Subsequently, we adapted LLMs to BP estimation tasks through fine-tuning. To evaluate the proposed approach, we conducted assessments of ten advanced LLMs using a comprehensive public dataset of wearable biosignals from 1,272 participants. The experimental results demonstrate that the optimally fine-tuned LLM significantly surpasses conventional task-specific baselines, achieving an estimation error of 0.00 pm 9.25 mmHg for systolic BP and 1.29 pm 6.37 mmHg for diastolic BP. Notably, the ablation studies highlight the benefits of our context enhancement strategy, leading to an 8.9% reduction in mean absolute error for systolic BP estimation. This paper pioneers the exploration of LLMs for cuffless BP measurement, providing a potential solution to enhance the accuracy of cuffless BP measurement.

Heart Disease Detection using Vision-Based Transformer Models from ECG Images

Heart disease, also known as cardiovascular disease, is a prevalent and critical medical condition characterized by the impairment of the heart and blood vessels, leading to various complications such as coronary artery disease, heart failure, and myocardial infarction. The timely and accurate detection of heart disease is of paramount importance in clinical practice. Early identification of individuals at risk enables proactive interventions, preventive measures, and personalized treatment strategies to mitigate the progression of the disease and reduce adverse outcomes. In recent years, the field of heart disease detection has witnessed notable advancements due to the integration of sophisticated technologies and computational approaches. These include machine learning algorithms, data mining techniques, and predictive modeling frameworks that leverage vast amounts of clinical and physiological data to improve diagnostic accuracy and risk stratification. In this work, we propose to detect heart disease from ECG images using cutting-edge technologies, namely vision transformer models. These models are Google-Vit, Microsoft-Beit, and Swin-Tiny. To the best of our knowledge, this is the initial endeavor concentrating on the detection of heart diseases through image-based ECG data by employing cuttingedge technologies namely, transformer models. To demonstrate the contribution of the proposed framework, the performance of vision transformer models are compared with state-of-the-art studies. Experiment results show that the proposed framework exhibits remarkable classification results.

Deep Learning for Personalized Electrocardiogram Diagnosis: A Review

The electrocardiogram (ECG) remains a fundamental tool in cardiac diagnostics, yet its interpretation traditionally reliant on the expertise of cardiologists. The emergence of deep learning has heralded a revolutionary era in medical data analysis, particularly in the domain of ECG diagnostics. However, inter-patient variability prohibit the generalibility of ECG-AI model trained on a population dataset, hence degrade the performance of ECG-AI on specific patient or patient group. Many studies have address this challenge using different deep learning technologies. This comprehensive review systematically synthesizes research from a wide range of studies to provide an in-depth examination of cutting-edge deep-learning techniques in personalized ECG diagnosis. The review outlines a rigorous methodology for the selection of pertinent scholarly articles and offers a comprehensive overview of deep learning approaches applied to personalized ECG diagnostics. Moreover, the challenges these methods encounter are investigated, along with future research directions, culminating in insights into how the integration of deep learning can transform personalized ECG diagnosis and enhance cardiac care. By emphasizing both the strengths and limitations of current methodologies, this review underscores the immense potential of deep learning to refine and redefine ECG analysis in clinical practice, paving the way for more accurate, efficient, and personalized cardiac diagnostics.

Bayesian Bi-clustering of Neural Spiking Activity with Latent Structures

Modern neural recording techniques allow neuroscientists to obtain spiking activity of multiple neurons from different brain regions over long time periods, which requires new statistical methods to be developed for understanding structure of the large-scale data. In this paper, we develop a bi-clustering method to cluster the neural spiking activity spatially and temporally, according to their low-dimensional latent structures. The spatial (neuron) clusters are defined by the latent trajectories within each neural population, while the temporal (state) clusters are defined by (populationally) synchronous local linear dynamics shared with different periods. To flexibly extract the bi-clustering structure, we build the model non-parametrically, and develop an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to sample the posterior distributions of model parameters. Validating our proposed MCMC algorithm through simulations, we find the method can recover unknown parameters and true bi-clustering structures successfully. We then apply the proposed bi-clustering method to multi-regional neural recordings under different experiment settings, where we find that simultaneously considering latent trajectories and spatial-temporal clustering structures can provide us with a more accurate and interpretable result. Overall, the proposed method provides scientific insights for large-scale (counting) time series with elongated recording periods, and it can potentially have application beyond neuroscience.

FunnelNet: An End-to-End Deep Learning Framework to Monitor Digital Heart Murmur in Real-Time

Objective: Heart murmurs are abnormal sounds caused by turbulent blood flow within the heart. Several diagnostic methods are available to detect heart murmurs and their severity, such as cardiac auscultation, echocardiography, phonocardiogram (PCG), etc. However, these methods have limitations, including extensive training and experience among healthcare providers, cost and accessibility of echocardiography, as well as noise interference and PCG data processing. This study aims to develop a novel end-to-end real-time heart murmur detection approach using traditional and depthwise separable convolutional networks. Methods: Continuous wavelet transform (CWT) was applied to extract meaningful features from the PCG data. The proposed network has three parts: the Squeeze net, the Bottleneck, and the Expansion net. The Squeeze net generates a compressed data representation, whereas the Bottleneck layer reduces computational complexity using a depthwise-separable convolutional network. The Expansion net is responsible for up-sampling the compressed data to a higher dimension, capturing tiny details of the representative data. Results: For evaluation, we used four publicly available datasets and achieved state-of-the-art performance in all datasets. Furthermore, we tested our proposed network on two resource-constrained devices: a Raspberry PI and an Android device, stripping it down into a tiny machine learning model (TinyML), achieving a maximum of 99.70%. Conclusion: The proposed model offers a deep learning framework for real-time accurate heart murmur detection within limited resources. Significance: It will significantly result in more accessible and practical medical services and reduced diagnosis time to assist medical professionals. The code is publicly available at TBA.

Brain decoding: toward real-time reconstruction of visual perception

In the past five years, the use of generative and foundational AI systems has greatly improved the decoding of brain activity. Visual perception, in particular, can now be decoded from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) with remarkable fidelity. This neuroimaging technique, however, suffers from a limited temporal resolution (approx0.5 Hz) and thus fundamentally constrains its real-time usage. Here, we propose an alternative approach based on magnetoencephalography (MEG), a neuroimaging device capable of measuring brain activity with high temporal resolution (approx5,000 Hz). For this, we develop an MEG decoding model trained with both contrastive and regression objectives and consisting of three modules: i) pretrained embeddings obtained from the image, ii) an MEG module trained end-to-end and iii) a pretrained image generator. Our results are threefold: Firstly, our MEG decoder shows a 7X improvement of image-retrieval over classic linear decoders. Second, late brain responses to images are best decoded with DINOv2, a recent foundational image model. Third, image retrievals and generations both suggest that high-level visual features can be decoded from MEG signals, although the same approach applied to 7T fMRI also recovers better low-level features. Overall, these results, while preliminary, provide an important step towards the decoding -- in real-time -- of the visual processes continuously unfolding within the human brain.

Du-IN: Discrete units-guided mask modeling for decoding speech from Intracranial Neural signals

Invasive brain-computer interfaces have garnered significant attention due to their high performance. The current intracranial stereoElectroEncephaloGraphy (sEEG) foundation models typically build univariate representations based on a single channel. Some of them further use Transformer to model the relationship among channels. However, due to the locality and specificity of brain computation, their performance on more difficult tasks, e.g., speech decoding, which demands intricate processing in specific brain regions, is yet to be fully investigated. We hypothesize that building multi-variate representations within certain brain regions can better capture the specific neural processing. To explore this hypothesis, we collect a well-annotated Chinese word-reading sEEG dataset, targeting language-related brain networks, over 12 subjects. Leveraging this benchmark dataset, we developed the Du-IN model that can extract contextual embeddings from specific brain regions through discrete codebook-guided mask modeling. Our model achieves SOTA performance on the downstream 61-word classification task, surpassing all baseline models. Model comparison and ablation analysis reveal that our design choices, including (i) multi-variate representation by fusing channels in vSMC and STG regions and (ii) self-supervision by discrete codebook-guided mask modeling, significantly contribute to these performances. Collectively, our approach, inspired by neuroscience findings, capitalizing on multi-variate neural representation from specific brain regions, is suitable for invasive brain modeling. It marks a promising neuro-inspired AI approach in BCI.

Prototype Learning to Create Refined Interpretable Digital Phenotypes from ECGs

Prototype-based neural networks offer interpretable predictions by comparing inputs to learned, representative signal patterns anchored in training data. While such models have shown promise in the classification of physiological data, it remains unclear whether their prototypes capture an underlying structure that aligns with broader clinical phenotypes. We use a prototype-based deep learning model trained for multi-label ECG classification using the PTB-XL dataset. Then without modification we performed inference on the MIMIC-IV clinical database. We assess whether individual prototypes, trained solely for classification, are associated with hospital discharge diagnoses in the form of phecodes in this external population. Individual prototypes demonstrate significantly stronger and more specific associations with clinical outcomes compared to the classifier's class predictions, NLP-extracted concepts, or broader prototype classes across all phecode categories. Prototype classes with mixed significance patterns exhibit significantly greater intra-class distances (p < 0.0001), indicating the model learned to differentiate clinically meaningful variations within diagnostic categories. The prototypes achieve strong predictive performance across diverse conditions, with AUCs ranging from 0.89 for atrial fibrillation to 0.91 for heart failure, while also showing substantial signal for non-cardiac conditions such as sepsis and renal disease. These findings suggest that prototype-based models can support interpretable digital phenotyping from physiologic time-series data, providing transferable intermediate phenotypes that capture clinically meaningful physiologic signatures beyond their original training objectives.

Multifaceted Feature Visualization: Uncovering the Different Types of Features Learned By Each Neuron in Deep Neural Networks

We can better understand deep neural networks by identifying which features each of their neurons have learned to detect. To do so, researchers have created Deep Visualization techniques including activation maximization, which synthetically generates inputs (e.g. images) that maximally activate each neuron. A limitation of current techniques is that they assume each neuron detects only one type of feature, but we know that neurons can be multifaceted, in that they fire in response to many different types of features: for example, a grocery store class neuron must activate either for rows of produce or for a storefront. Previous activation maximization techniques constructed images without regard for the multiple different facets of a neuron, creating inappropriate mixes of colors, parts of objects, scales, orientations, etc. Here, we introduce an algorithm that explicitly uncovers the multiple facets of each neuron by producing a synthetic visualization of each of the types of images that activate a neuron. We also introduce regularization methods that produce state-of-the-art results in terms of the interpretability of images obtained by activation maximization. By separately synthesizing each type of image a neuron fires in response to, the visualizations have more appropriate colors and coherent global structure. Multifaceted feature visualization thus provides a clearer and more comprehensive description of the role of each neuron.

A Review of Deep Learning Approaches for Non-Invasive Cognitive Impairment Detection

This review paper explores recent advances in deep learning approaches for non-invasive cognitive impairment detection. We examine various non-invasive indicators of cognitive decline, including speech and language, facial, and motoric mobility. The paper provides an overview of relevant datasets, feature-extracting techniques, and deep-learning architectures applied to this domain. We have analyzed the performance of different methods across modalities and observed that speech and language-based methods generally achieved the highest detection performance. Studies combining acoustic and linguistic features tended to outperform those using a single modality. Facial analysis methods showed promise for visual modalities but were less extensively studied. Most papers focused on binary classification (impaired vs. non-impaired), with fewer addressing multi-class or regression tasks. Transfer learning and pre-trained language models emerged as popular and effective techniques, especially for linguistic analysis. Despite significant progress, several challenges remain, including data standardization and accessibility, model explainability, longitudinal analysis limitations, and clinical adaptation. Lastly, we propose future research directions, such as investigating language-agnostic speech analysis methods, developing multi-modal diagnostic systems, and addressing ethical considerations in AI-assisted healthcare. By synthesizing current trends and identifying key obstacles, this review aims to guide further development of deep learning-based cognitive impairment detection systems to improve early diagnosis and ultimately patient outcomes.

Realism in Action: Anomaly-Aware Diagnosis of Brain Tumors from Medical Images Using YOLOv8 and DeiT

In the field of medical sciences, reliable detection and classification of brain tumors from images remains a formidable challenge due to the rarity of tumors within the population of patients. Therefore, the ability to detect tumors in anomaly scenarios is paramount for ensuring timely interventions and improved patient outcomes. This study addresses the issue by leveraging deep learning (DL) techniques to detect and classify brain tumors in challenging situations. The curated data set from the National Brain Mapping Lab (NBML) comprises 81 patients, including 30 Tumor cases and 51 Normal cases. The detection and classification pipelines are separated into two consecutive tasks. The detection phase involved comprehensive data analysis and pre-processing to modify the number of image samples and the number of patients of each class to anomaly distribution (9 Normal per 1 Tumor) to comply with real world scenarios. Next, in addition to common evaluation metrics for the testing, we employed a novel performance evaluation method called Patient to Patient (PTP), focusing on the realistic evaluation of the model. In the detection phase, we fine-tuned a YOLOv8n detection model to detect the tumor region. Subsequent testing and evaluation yielded competitive performance both in Common Evaluation Metrics and PTP metrics. Furthermore, using the Data Efficient Image Transformer (DeiT) module, we distilled a Vision Transformer (ViT) model from a fine-tuned ResNet152 as a teacher in the classification phase. This approach demonstrates promising strides in reliable tumor detection and classification, offering potential advancements in tumor diagnosis for real-world medical imaging scenarios.

Unleashing the Potential of Spiking Neural Networks by Dynamic Confidence

This paper presents a new methodology to alleviate the fundamental trade-off between accuracy and latency in spiking neural networks (SNNs). The approach involves decoding confidence information over time from the SNN outputs and using it to develop a decision-making agent that can dynamically determine when to terminate each inference. The proposed method, Dynamic Confidence, provides several significant benefits to SNNs. 1. It can effectively optimize latency dynamically at runtime, setting it apart from many existing low-latency SNN algorithms. Our experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets have demonstrated an average 40% speedup across eight different settings after applying Dynamic Confidence. 2. The decision-making agent in Dynamic Confidence is straightforward to construct and highly robust in parameter space, making it extremely easy to implement. 3. The proposed method enables visualizing the potential of any given SNN, which sets a target for current SNNs to approach. For instance, if an SNN can terminate at the most appropriate time point for each input sample, a ResNet-50 SNN can achieve an accuracy as high as 82.47% on ImageNet within just 4.71 time steps on average. Unlocking the potential of SNNs needs a highly-reliable decision-making agent to be constructed and fed with a high-quality estimation of ground truth. In this regard, Dynamic Confidence represents a meaningful step toward realizing the potential of SNNs.

A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks

Detecting test samples drawn sufficiently far away from the training distribution statistically or adversarially is a fundamental requirement for deploying a good classifier in many real-world machine learning applications. However, deep neural networks with the softmax classifier are known to produce highly overconfident posterior distributions even for such abnormal samples. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method for detecting any abnormal samples, which is applicable to any pre-trained softmax neural classifier. We obtain the class conditional Gaussian distributions with respect to (low- and upper-level) features of the deep models under Gaussian discriminant analysis, which result in a confidence score based on the Mahalanobis distance. While most prior methods have been evaluated for detecting either out-of-distribution or adversarial samples, but not both, the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performances for both cases in our experiments. Moreover, we found that our proposed method is more robust in harsh cases, e.g., when the training dataset has noisy labels or small number of samples. Finally, we show that the proposed method enjoys broader usage by applying it to class-incremental learning: whenever out-of-distribution samples are detected, our classification rule can incorporate new classes well without further training deep models.

EndoNet: A Deep Architecture for Recognition Tasks on Laparoscopic Videos

Surgical workflow recognition has numerous potential medical applications, such as the automatic indexing of surgical video databases and the optimization of real-time operating room scheduling, among others. As a result, phase recognition has been studied in the context of several kinds of surgeries, such as cataract, neurological, and laparoscopic surgeries. In the literature, two types of features are typically used to perform this task: visual features and tool usage signals. However, the visual features used are mostly handcrafted. Furthermore, the tool usage signals are usually collected via a manual annotation process or by using additional equipment. In this paper, we propose a novel method for phase recognition that uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically learn features from cholecystectomy videos and that relies uniquely on visual information. In previous studies, it has been shown that the tool signals can provide valuable information in performing the phase recognition task. Thus, we present a novel CNN architecture, called EndoNet, that is designed to carry out the phase recognition and tool presence detection tasks in a multi-task manner. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work proposing to use a CNN for multiple recognition tasks on laparoscopic videos. Extensive experimental comparisons to other methods show that EndoNet yields state-of-the-art results for both tasks.

Neuroformer: Multimodal and Multitask Generative Pretraining for Brain Data

State-of-the-art systems neuroscience experiments yield large-scale multimodal data, and these data sets require new tools for analysis. Inspired by the success of large pretrained models in vision and language domains, we reframe the analysis of large-scale, cellular-resolution neuronal spiking data into an autoregressive spatiotemporal generation problem. Neuroformer is a multimodal, multitask generative pretrained transformer (GPT) model that is specifically designed to handle the intricacies of data in systems neuroscience. It scales linearly with feature size, can process an arbitrary number of modalities, and is adaptable to downstream tasks, such as predicting behavior. We first trained Neuroformer on simulated datasets, and found that it both accurately predicted simulated neuronal circuit activity, and also intrinsically inferred the underlying neural circuit connectivity, including direction. When pretrained to decode neural responses, the model predicted the behavior of a mouse with only few-shot fine-tuning, suggesting that the model begins learning how to do so directly from the neural representations themselves, without any explicit supervision. We used an ablation study to show that joint training on neuronal responses and behavior boosted performance, highlighting the model's ability to associate behavioral and neural representations in an unsupervised manner. These findings show that Neuroformer can analyze neural datasets and their emergent properties, informing the development of models and hypotheses associated with the brain.

CLARA: Clinical Report Auto-completion

Generating clinical reports from raw recordings such as X-rays and electroencephalogram (EEG) is an essential and routine task for doctors. However, it is often time-consuming to write accurate and detailed reports. Most existing methods try to generate the whole reports from the raw input with limited success because 1) generated reports often contain errors that need manual review and correction, 2) it does not save time when doctors want to write additional information into the report, and 3) the generated reports are not customized based on individual doctors' preference. We propose {\it CL}inic{\it A}l {\it R}eport {\it A}uto-completion (CLARA), an interactive method that generates reports in a sentence by sentence fashion based on doctors' anchor words and partially completed sentences. CLARA searches for most relevant sentences from existing reports as the template for the current report. The retrieved sentences are sequentially modified by combining with the input feature representations to create the final report. In our experimental evaluation, CLARA achieved 0.393 CIDEr and 0.248 BLEU-4 on X-ray reports and 0.482 CIDEr and 0.491 BLEU-4 for EEG reports for sentence-level generation, which is up to 35% improvement over the best baseline. Also via our qualitative evaluation, CLARA is shown to produce reports which have a significantly higher level of approval by doctors in a user study (3.74 out of 5 for CLARA vs 2.52 out of 5 for the baseline).

RLEEGNet: Integrating Brain-Computer Interfaces with Adaptive AI for Intuitive Responsiveness and High-Accuracy Motor Imagery Classification

Current approaches to prosthetic control are limited by their reliance on traditional methods, which lack real-time adaptability and intuitive responsiveness. These limitations are particularly pronounced in assistive technologies designed for individuals with diverse cognitive states and motor intentions. In this paper, we introduce a framework that leverages Reinforcement Learning (RL) with Deep Q-Networks (DQN) for classification tasks. Additionally, we present a preprocessing technique using the Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) for multiclass motor imagery (MI) classification in a One-Versus-The-Rest (OVR) manner. The subsequent 'csp space' transformation retains the temporal dimension of EEG signals, crucial for extracting discriminative features. The integration of DQN with a 1D-CNN-LSTM architecture optimizes the decision-making process in real-time, thereby enhancing the system's adaptability to the user's evolving needs and intentions. We elaborate on the data processing methods for two EEG motor imagery datasets. Our innovative model, RLEEGNet, incorporates a 1D-CNN-LSTM architecture as the Online Q-Network within the DQN, facilitating continuous adaptation and optimization of control strategies through feedback. This mechanism allows the system to learn optimal actions through trial and error, progressively improving its performance. RLEEGNet demonstrates high accuracy in classifying MI-EEG signals, achieving as high as 100% accuracy in MI tasks across both the GigaScience (3-class) and BCI-IV-2a (4-class) datasets. These results highlight the potential of combining DQN with a 1D-CNN-LSTM architecture to significantly enhance the adaptability and responsiveness of BCI systems.

CARE to Compare: A real-world dataset for anomaly detection in wind turbine data

Anomaly detection plays a crucial role in the field of predictive maintenance for wind turbines, yet the comparison of different algorithms poses a difficult task because domain specific public datasets are scarce. Many comparisons of different approaches either use benchmarks composed of data from many different domains, inaccessible data or one of the few publicly available datasets which lack detailed information about the faults. Moreover, many publications highlight a couple of case studies where fault detection was successful. With this paper we publish a high quality dataset that contains data from 36 wind turbines across 3 different wind farms as well as the most detailed fault information of any public wind turbine dataset as far as we know. The new dataset contains 89 years worth of real-world operating data of wind turbines, distributed across 44 labeled time frames for anomalies that led up to faults, as well as 51 time series representing normal behavior. Additionally, the quality of training data is ensured by turbine-status-based labels for each data point. Furthermore, we propose a new scoring method, called CARE (Coverage, Accuracy, Reliability and Earliness), which takes advantage of the information depth that is present in the dataset to identify a good all-around anomaly detection model. This score considers the anomaly detection performance, the ability to recognize normal behavior properly and the capability to raise as few false alarms as possible while simultaneously detecting anomalies early.

A Hybrid Framework for Real-Time Data Drift and Anomaly Identification Using Hierarchical Temporal Memory and Statistical Tests

Data Drift is the phenomenon where the generating model behind the data changes over time. Due to data drift, any model built on the past training data becomes less relevant and inaccurate over time. Thus, detecting and controlling for data drift is critical in machine learning models. Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) is a machine learning model developed by Jeff Hawkins, inspired by how the human brain processes information. It is a biologically inspired model of memory that is similar in structure to the neocortex, and whose performance is claimed to be comparable to state of the art models in detecting anomalies in time series data. Another unique benefit of HTMs is its independence from training and testing cycle; all the learning takes place online with streaming data and no separate training and testing cycle is required. In sequential learning paradigm, Sequential Probability Ratio Test (SPRT) offers some unique benefit for online learning and inference. This paper proposes a novel hybrid framework combining HTM and SPRT for real-time data drift detection and anomaly identification. Unlike existing data drift methods, our approach eliminates frequent retraining and ensures low false positive rates. HTMs currently work with one dimensional or univariate data. In a second study, we also propose an application of HTM in multidimensional supervised scenario for anomaly detection by combining the outputs of multiple HTM columns, one for each dimension of the data, through a neural network. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms conventional drift detection techniques like the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test, Wasserstein distance, and Population Stability Index (PSI) in terms of accuracy, adaptability, and computational efficiency. Our experiments also provide insights into optimizing hyperparameters for real-time deployment in domains such as Telecom.

Dissecting Self-Supervised Learning Methods for Surgical Computer Vision

The field of surgical computer vision has undergone considerable breakthroughs in recent years with the rising popularity of deep neural network-based methods. However, standard fully-supervised approaches for training such models require vast amounts of annotated data, imposing a prohibitively high cost; especially in the clinical domain. Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods, which have begun to gain traction in the general computer vision community, represent a potential solution to these annotation costs, allowing to learn useful representations from only unlabeled data. Still, the effectiveness of SSL methods in more complex and impactful domains, such as medicine and surgery, remains limited and unexplored. In this work, we address this critical need by investigating four state-of-the-art SSL methods (MoCo v2, SimCLR, DINO, SwAV) in the context of surgical computer vision. We present an extensive analysis of the performance of these methods on the Cholec80 dataset for two fundamental and popular tasks in surgical context understanding, phase recognition and tool presence detection. We examine their parameterization, then their behavior with respect to training data quantities in semi-supervised settings. Correct transfer of these methods to surgery, as described and conducted in this work, leads to substantial performance gains over generic uses of SSL - up to 7.4% on phase recognition and 20% on tool presence detection - as well as state-of-the-art semi-supervised phase recognition approaches by up to 14%. Further results obtained on a highly diverse selection of surgical datasets exhibit strong generalization properties. The code is available at https://github.com/CAMMA-public/SelfSupSurg.