Investigation of the MobileNetV2 Optimal Feature Extraction Layer for EEG-Based Dementia Severity Classification: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Diagnosing dementia and recognizing substantial cognitive decline are challenging tasks. Thus, the objective of this study was to classify electroencephalograms (EEGs) recorded during a working memory task in 15 patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCogImp), 5 patients with vascular dementia (VasD), and 15 healthy controls (NC). Before creating spectrogram pictures from the EEG dataset, the data were subjected to preprocessing, which included preprocessing using conventional filters and the discrete wavelet transformation. The convolutional neural network (CNN) MobileNetV2 was employed in our investigation to identify features and assess the severity of dementia. The features were extracted from five layers of the MobileNetV2 CNN architecture—convolutional layers (‘Conv-1’), batch normalization (‘Conv-1-bn’), clipped ReLU (‘out-relu’), 2D Global Average Pooling (‘global-average-pooling2d1’), and fully connected (‘Logits’) layers. This was carried out to find the efficient features layer for dementia severity from EEGs. Feature extraction from MobileNetV2’s five layers was carried out using a decision tree (DT) and k-nearest neighbor (KNN) machine learning (ML) classifier, in conjunction with a MobileNetV2 deep learning (DL) network. The study’s findings show that the DT classifier performed best using features derived from MobileNetV2 with the 2D Global Average Pooling (global-average-pooling2d-1) layer, achieving an accuracy score of 95.9%. Second place went to the characteristics of the fully connected (Logits) layer, which achieved a score of 95.3%. The findings of this study endorse the utilization of deep processing algorithms, offering a viable approach for improving early dementia identification with high precision, hence facilitating the differentiation among NC individuals, VasD patients, and MCogImp patients.