EEG-SeeGraph: Interpreting functional connectivity disruptions in dementias via sparse-explanatory dynamic EEG-graph learning
Organizations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China · Institute of Neurological Diseases, Shenzhen Bay Laboratory, Shenzhen · Institute of Neurological Diseases, Shenzhen Bay Laboratory, Shenzhen, China
Abstract
Robust and interpretable dementia diagnosis from noisy, non-stationary electroencephalography (EEG) is clinically essential yet remains challenging. To this end, we propose SeeGraph, a Sparse-Explanatory dynamic EEG-graph network that models time-evolving functional connectivity and employs a node-guided sparse edge mask to reveal the connections that drive diagnostic decisions, while remaining robust to noise and cross-site variability. SeeGraph comprises four components: (1) a dual-trajectory temporal encoder that models dynamic EEG with two streams, where node signals capture regional oscillations and edge signals capture interregional coupling; (2) a topology-aware positional encoder that derives graph-spectral Laplacian coordinates from the fused connectivity and augments node embeddings; (3) a node-guided sparse explanatory edge mask that gates the connectivity into a compact subgraph; and (4) a gated graph predictor that operates on the sparsified graph. The framework is trained using cross-entropy loss together with a sparsity regularizer on the mask, yielding noise-robust and interpretable diagnoses. The effectiveness of SeeGraph is validated on public and in-house EEG cohorts, including patients with neurodegenerative dementias and healthy controls, under both raw and noise-perturbed conditions. Its sparse, node-guided explanations highlight disease-relevant connections and align with established clinical findings on functional connectivity alterations, thereby offering transparent cues for neurological evaluation.
Figures & tables
| Method | SZPH Dataset ( China ) | AHEPA Dataset ( Greece ) | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Raw (no added noise) | Noisy | Raw (no added noise) | Noisy | |||||||||
| ACC | AUROC | F1 | ACC | AUROC | F1 | ACC | AUROC | F1 | ACC | AUROC | F1 | |
| BIOT [ 27 ] | 0.765 | 0.820 | 0.761 | 0.621 | 0.767 | 0.607 | 0.812 | 0.937 | 0.798 | 0.733 | 0.786 | 0.712 |
| DCRNN [ 21 ] | 0.760 | 0.819 | 0.779 | 0.661 | 0.740 | 0.737 | 0.738 | 0.819 | 0.719 | 0.651 | 0.734 | 0.657 |
| EGCN [ 15 ] | 0.734 | 0.726 | 0.718 | 0.645 | 0.643 | 0.660 | 0.648 | 0.769 | 0.614 | 0.602 | 0.736 | 0.522 |
| CNN-LSTM | 0.770 | 0.804 | 0.772 | 0.723 | 0.731 | 0.695 | 0.635 | 0.752 | 0.556 | 0.592 | 0.631 | 0.542 |
| Bands | SZPH Dataset ( China ) | AHEPA dataset ( Greece ) | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Raw (no added noise) | Noisy | Raw (no added noise) | Noisy | |||||||||
| ACC | AUROC | F1 | ACC | AUROC | F1 | ACC | AUROC | F1 | ACC | AUROC | F1 | |
| (Delta) | 0.693 | 0.795 | 0.716 | 0.663 | 0.765 | 0.664 | NAN | NAN | NAN | NAN | NAN | NAN |
| (Theta) | 0.702 | 0.867 | 0.621 | 0.815 | 0.830 | 0.804 | 0.739 | 0.897 | 0.719 | 0.725 | 0.876 | 0.710 |
| (Alpha) | 0.792 | 0.817 | 0.773 | 0.729 | 0.816 | 0.745 | 0.881 | 0.969 | 0.876 | 0.832 | 0.937 | 0.851 |
| (Beta) | 0.828 | 0.887 | 0.818 | 0.785 | 0.862 | 0.764 | 0.827 | 0.948 | 0.820 | 0.789 | 0.895 | 0.763 |
| Method | SZPH | AHEPA | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACC | AUROC | F1 | ACC | AUROC | F1 | |
| SeeGraph | 0.874 | 0.951 | 0.875 | 0.841 | 0.953 | 0.834 |
| w/o C-wise | 0.855 | 0.938 | 0.862 | 0.823 | 0.904 | 0.805 |
| w/o PE | 0.837 | 0.905 | 0.841 | 0.824 | 0.918 | 0.829 |
| w/o SR | 0.770 | 0.864 | 0.761 | 0.812 | 0.937 | 0.798 |
| w/o FFT | 0.758 | 0.842 | 0.772 | 0.784 | 0.924 | 0.768 |
Electroencephalography
Electroencephalography (EEG) studies brain-generated electrical activity to understand cognition and support diagnosis, monitoring, and brain-computer interfaces.
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