Leveraging Pretrained Vision Transformers for classifying Alcohol Use Disorder using Raw Resting-State EEG

Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) is a prevalent and debilitating neuropsychiatric condition characterized by compulsive alcohol consumption, impaired control, and negative emotional states, affecting about 28 million adults in the United States. Despite its significant public health burden, there are few objective biomarkers and no reliable neurophysiological tools to assist in its clinical diagnosis. In this study, we investigated the potential of deep learning to classify individuals with AUD using raw resting-state electroencephalogram (EEG) data. EEG recordings were obtained from the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA), a large, longitudinal, multi-site dataset. The initial cohort included a total of 5,402 recordings from 2,710 participants (aged 12-83, mean age 24; 1,338 males and 1,372 females). To reduce confounding factors, we applied demographic matching, and to address class imbalance, we applied undersampling. Minimal preprocessing was applied to preserve the raw EEG features. We utilized EEGViT, a hybrid deep learning architecture that combines convolutional patch embedding with a Vision Transformer (ViT) pretrained on ImageNet, thereby enabling end-to-end learning directly from raw EEG input. The analysis was stratified by sex and age, and all groups were age-matched. To validate the generalization of the model, models were also trained for Cannabis Use Disorder (CUD) and Opioid Use Disorder (OUD). Results for the AUD model showed a classification accuracy of approximately 56% in the overall dataset, 54% for males, and 58% for females. The CUD model showed an accuracy of about 63% with 59% for females and 69% for males. The OUD model showed an accuracy of about 63% with 61% for females and 65% for males. Temporal analysis indicated that the model's performance varied across time intervals, with higher accuracy observed in later minutes compared to earlier ones. While modest, these findings underscore the potential of transformer-based models in psychiatric classification using raw EEG data and provide a foundation for future development of EEG-based diagnostic tools for AUD.