NeuroAtlas: Benchmarking Foundation Models for Clinical EEG and Brain-Computer Interfaces

Foundation models (FMs) promise to extract unified representations that generalize across downstream tasks. They have emerged across fields, including electroencephalography (EEG), but it is less clear how effective they are in this particular field. Published evaluations differ in datasets, in the EEG-specific preprocessing that might influence reported results, and in the reported metrics, frequently obscuring the clinical relevance in EEG. We introduce NeuroAtlas, the largest EEG benchmark to date: 42 datasets and 260k hours covering clinical EEG (epilepsy, sleep medicine, brain age estimation) and brain-computer interfaces, and include multiple datasets per task along with bespoke clinical evaluation metrics. Besides evaluating EEG-FMs with respect to supervised baselines, we present results from generic time-series FMs. We report three findings. First, EEG-specific FMs do not consistently outperform time-series FMs, which have neither EEG-focused architectures nor been pretrained on EEG. Second, standard machine learning metrics are insufficient to assess clinical utility: thus, we thoroughly evaluate more appropriate measures such as the quality of event-level decision-making, hypnogram-derived features, and the brain-age gap in the domains of epilepsy, sleep, and brain age, respectively. Third, model rankings and performance can vary substantially within domains. We conclude that pretrained models perform largely on par, with only narrow advantages for a few, and that current models do not yet deliver on the promise of an out-of-the-box unified EEG model. NeuroAtlas exposes this gap and provides the datasets and metrics for the next generation of unified EEG FMs.

SeizeIT2: Wearable Dataset Of Patients With Focal Epilepsy

The increasing technological advancements towards miniaturized physiological measuring devices have enabled continuous monitoring of epileptic patients outside of specialized environments. The large amounts of data that can be recorded with such devices holds significant potential for developing automated seizure detection frameworks. In this work, we present SeizeIT2, the first open dataset of wearable data recorded in patients with focal epilepsy. The dataset comprises more than 11,000 hours of multimodal data, including behind-the-ear electroencephalography, electrocardiography, electromyography and movement (accelerometer and gyroscope) data. The dataset contains 886 focal seizures recorded from 125 patients across five different European Epileptic Monitoring Centers. We present a suggestive training/validation split to propel the development of AI methodologies for seizure detection, as well as two benchmark approaches and evaluation metrics. The dataset can be accessed on OpenNeuro and is stored in Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) format.