High-order brain functional network for electroencephalography-based diagnosis of major depressive disorder

Brain functional network (BFN) based on electroencephalography (EEG) has been widely used to diagnose brain diseases, such as major depressive disorder (MDD). However, most existing BFNs only consider the correlation between two channels, ignoring the high-level interaction among multiple channels that contain more rich information for diagnosing brain diseases. In such a sense, the BFN is called low-order BFN (LO-BFN). In order to fully explore the high-level interactive information among multiple channels of the EEG signals, a scheme for constructing a high-order BFN (HO-BFN) based on the “correlation’s correlation” strategy is proposed in this paper. Specifically, the entire EEG time series is firstly divided into multiple epochs by sliding window. For each epoch, the short-term correlation between channels is calculated to construct a LO-BFN. The correlation time series of all channel pairs are formulated by these LO-BFNs obtained from all epochs to describe the dynamic change of short-term correlation along the time. To construct HO-BFN, we cluster all correlation time series to avoid the problems caused by high dimensionality, and the correlation of the average correlation time series from different clusters is calculated to reflect the high-order correlation among multiple channels. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed HO-BFN in MDD identification, and its integration with the LO-BFN can further improve the recognition rate.