Prediction of treatment response in major depressive disorder using a hybrid of convolutional recurrent deep neural networks and effective connectivity based on EEG signal.

In this study, we have developed a novel method based on deep learning and brain effective connectivity to classify responders and non-responders to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) antidepressants in major depressive disorder (MDD) patients prior to the treatment using EEG signal. The effective connectivity of 30 MDD patients was determined by analyzing their pretreatment EEG signals, which were then concatenated into delta, theta, alpha, and beta bands and transformed into images. Using these images, we then fine tuned a hybrid Convolutional Neural Network that is enhanced with bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory cells based on transfer learning. The Inception-v3, ResNet18, DenseNet121, and EfficientNet-B0 models are implemented as base models. Finally, the models are followed by BiLSTM and dense layers in order to classify responders and non-responders to SSRI treatment. Results showed that the EfficiencyNet-B0 has the highest accuracy of 98.33, followed by DensNet121, ResNet18 and Inception-v3. Therefore, a new method was proposed in this study that uses deep learning models to extract both spatial and temporal features automatically, which will improve classification results. The proposed method provides accurate identification of MDD patients who are responding, thereby reducing the cost of medical facilities and patient care.