Decoding of visual-related information from the human EEG using an end-to-end deep learning approach

There is increasing interest in using deep learning approach for EEG analysis as there are still rooms for the improvement of EEG analysis in its accuracy. Convolutional long short-term (CNNLSTM) has been successfully applied in time series data with spatial structure through end-to-end learning. Here, we proposed a CNNLSTM based neural network architecture termed EEGCNNLSTMNet for the classification of EEG signals in response to grating stimuli with different spatial frequencies. EEGCNNLSTMNet comprises two convolutional layers and one bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) layer. The convolutional layers capture local temporal characteristics of the EEG signal at each channel as well as global spatial characteristics across channels, while the LSTM layer extracts long-term temporal dependency of EEG signals. Our experiment showed that EEGCNNLSTMNet performed much better at EEG classification than a traditional machine learning approach, i.e. a support vector machine (SVM) with features. Additionally, EEGCNNLSTMNet outperformed EEGNet, a state-of-art neural network architecture for the intra-subject case. We infer that the underperformance when using an LSTM layer in the inter-subject case is due to long-term dependency characteristics in the EEG signal that vary greatly across subjects. Moreover, the inter-subject fine-tuned classification model using very little data of the new subject achieved much higher accuracy than that trained only on the data from the other subjects. Our study suggests that the fine-tuned inter-subject model can be a potential end-to-end EEG analysis method considering both the accuracy and the required training data of the new subject.