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

Yuqi Chen, Kan Ren, Kaitao Song, Yansen Wang, Yifan Wang, Dongsheng Li, Lili Qiu

Track: Traditional track

Keywords: EEG Signal, Foundation Model, Large-Scale Pretrain

TL;DR: We propose a novel pretraining strategy for large-scale EEG data.

Abstract: 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.

Presentation And Attendance Policy: I have read and agree with the symposium's policy on behalf of myself and my co-authors.

Ethics Board Approval: Yes, we have/will include(d) information about IRB approval or its equivalent, in the manuscript.

Data And Code Availability: Yes, we will make data and code available upon acceptance.

Primary Area: Clinical foundation models

Student First Author: Yes, the primary author of the manuscript is a student.

Submission Number: 1