STGE-Former: Spatial-Temporal Graph-Enhanced Transformer for EEG-Based Major Depressive Disorder Detection

Applying deep learning techniques to Electroencephalogram (EEG) data has shown great potential in the field of depression detection. However, existing EEG-based depression detection models face challenges: they struggle to capture the complex spatiotemporal dependencies and the complementary nature of spatiotemporal information in EEG data; functional connectivity between brain regions is not sufficiently considered. To address these issues, we propose a new Spatial-Temporal Graph-Enhanced Transformer, named STGE-Former. Raw EEG signals are first mapped to Spatial-Temporal Shared Embeddings, then processed by the Spatial Attention Stream and the Temporal Graph-Enhanced Attention Stream to extract spatiotemporal complementary information, and finally classified through a classification head. Experimental results on the MODMA dataset show that our model outperforms existing methods in the task of EEG-Based MDD Detection. STGE-Former provides a promising approach for automatic depression detection. The code is available at https://github.com/RockyChen0205/STGE-Former.