Acupuncture State Detection at Zusanli (ST-36) Based on Scalp EEG and Transformer

In clinical acupuncture practice, needle twirling (NT) and needle retention (NR) are strategically combined to achieve different therapeutic effects, highlighting the importance of distinguishing between different acupuncture states. Scalp EEG has been proven significantly relevant to brain activity and acupuncture stimulation. In this work, we designed an acupuncture paradigm to collect scalp EEG to study the differences in EEG changes during different acupuncture states. Since deep learning (DL) has been increasingly used in EEG analysis, we propose the Acupuncture Transformer Detector (ATD), a model based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Transformer technology. ATD encapsulates the local and global features of EEG under the acupuncture states of Zusanli acupoint (ST-36) in an end-to-end classification framework. The experiment results from 28 healthy participants show that the proposed model can efficiently classify the EEG in different states, with an accuracy of $85.47\pm 0.73\%$. In this study, time-frequency analysis revealed that power changes were mainly confined to the delta frequency band under different acupuncture states. Brain topography revealed that ST-36 was activated primarily on the left frontal and parieto-occipital areas. This method provides new ideas for automatic recognition of acupuncture status from the perspective of DL, offering new solutions for standardizing acupuncture procedures.