Classifying major depression patients and healthy controls using EEG, eye tracking and galvanic skin response data

Objective: Major depression disorder (MDD) is one of the most prevalent mental disorders worldwide. Diagnosing depression in the early stage is crucial to treatment process. However, due to depression's comorbid nature and the subjectivity in diagnosis, an early diagnosis could be challenging. Recently, machine learning approaches have been used to process Electroencephalography (EEG) and neuroimaging data to facilitate the diagnosis. In the present study, we used a multimodal machine learning approach involving EEG, eye tracking and galvanic skin response data as input to classify depression patients and healthy controls. Methods: One hundred and forty-four MDD depression patients and 204 matched healthy controls were recruited. They were required to watch a series of affective and neutral stimuli while EEG, eye tracking information and galvanic skin response were recorded via a set of low-cost, portable devices. Three machine learning algorithms including Random Forests, Logistic Regression and Support Vector Machine (SVM) were trained to build dichotomous classification model. Results: The results showed that the highest classification f1 score was obtained by Logistic Regression algorithms, with accuracy = 79.63%, precision = 76.67%, recall= 85.19% and f1 score= 80.70% Limitations: No hospitalized patients were available; only outpatients were included in the present study. The sample consisted mostly of young adult, and no elder patients were included. Conclusions: The machine learning approach can be a useful tool for classifying MDD patients and healthy controls and may help for diagnostic processes.