Explainable Interictal Epileptiform Discharge Detection Method Based on Scalp EEG and Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The detection of interictal epileptiform discharge (IED) is crucial for the diagnosis of epilepsy, but automated methods often lack interpretability. This study proposes IED-RAG, an explainable multimodal framework for joint IED detection and report generation. Our approach employs a dual-encoder to extract electrophysiological and semantic features, aligned via contrastive learning in a shared EEG-text embedding space. During inference, clinically relevant EEG-text pairs are retrieved from a vector database as explicit evidence to condition a large language model (LLM) for the generation of evidence-based reports. Evaluated on a private dataset from Wuhan Children's Hospital and the public TUH EEG Events Corpus (TUEV), the framework achieved balanced accuracies of 89.17\% and 71.38\%, with BLEU scores of 89.61\% and 64.14\%, respectively. The results demonstrate that retrieval of explicit evidence enhances both diagnostic performance and clinical interpretability compared to standard black-box methods.

Exact Fit Attention in Node-Holistic Graph Convolutional Network for Improved EEG-Based Driver Fatigue Detection

EEG-based fatigue monitoring can effectively reduce the incidence of related traffic accidents. In the past decade, with the advancement of deep learning, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been increasingly used for EEG signal processing. However, due to the data's non-Euclidean characteristics, existing CNNs may lose important spatial information from EEG, specifically channel correlation. Thus, we propose the node-holistic graph convolutional network (NHGNet), a model that uses graphic convolution to dynamically learn each channel's features. With exact fit attention optimization, the network captures inter-channel correlations through a trainable adjacency matrix. The interpretability is enhanced by revealing critical areas of brain activity and their interrelations in various mental states. In validations on two public datasets, NHGNet outperforms the SOTAs. Specifically, in the intra-subject, NHGNet improved detection accuracy by at least 2.34% and 3.42%, and in the inter-subjects, it improved by at least 2.09% and 15.06%. Visualization research on the model revealed that the central parietal area plays an important role in detecting fatigue levels, whereas the frontal and temporal lobes are essential for maintaining vigilance.