An EEG-Based Edge-AI Framework for Alzheimer’s and Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease Classification

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG) has emerged as a promising non-invasive tool for the diagnosis of neurodegenerative disorders, and artificial intelligence (AI) has shown significant potential in this domain, as demonstrated by recent studies. However, strong inter-subject variability remains a major challenge, limiting the ability of AI-based models to learn disease-specific features that generalize across individuals, thereby hindering the development of clinically deployable subject-independent systems. In this work, we propose a cross-subject, AI-based EEG classification framework to distinguish between Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD), and healthy control subjects using clinical EEG data collected from a local hospital. A lightweight hybrid deep learning model is developed, combining a two-layer one-dimensional convolutional neural network with a two-layer Transformer encoder to capture both local temporal patterns and long-range dependencies in EEG signals. The proposed model achieves an average classification accuracy of (Formula presented.), representing a (Formula presented.) improvement over a baseline model evaluated on a cohort of 36 subjects. To assess deployment feasibility in real-time clinical settings, the trained model is implemented and evaluated on an edge-AI platform (NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin), demonstrating energy efficiency for the inference with a compact model footprint. These results indicate that the proposed approach provides an accurate, efficient, and practically deployable solution for subject-independent EEG-based classification of neurological disorders.