FSC-BiMamba: A Dual-Branch Bidirectional Mamba Network for Frontal Sparse-Channel EEG Depression Detection

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a common psychiatric disorder. Electroencephalography (EEG) provides physiological information for depression detection, but many existing methods rely on dense multichannel recordings, limiting their use in lightweight EEG screening. Frontal sparse-channel EEG reduces acquisition burden but provides limited spatial information, requiring effective within-window representation learning and cross-window temporal modelling. Methods: We propose FSC-BiMamba, a dual-branch bidirectional Mamba network for subject-independent window-level MDD classification from frontal sparse-channel EEG. For each window, a Time–Frequency Map Encoder (TFME) learns local time–frequency patterns, while a Frequency-Domain Statistical Descriptor Encoder (FSDE) encodes complementary frequency-domain statistical descriptors. An Adaptive Dual-Token Fusion (ADTF) module integrates the resulting tokens through feature-wise gating to form a unified window representation. Representations from eight consecutive windows are then processed by a bidirectional Mamba (BiMamba) module to capture cross-window context. Finally, a softmax classifier converts each contextualized representation into a window-level class prediction. Results: Performance was evaluated using stratified subject-independent five-fold cross-validation. FSC-BiMamba achieved window-level accuracies of 82.70 ± 2.37% and 84.55 ± 8.01% on MODMA and Mumtaz2016, respectively. Together with its compact architecture, these results indicate a favourable balance between classification performance and model size. Conclusions: FSC-BiMamba effectively integrates complementary window-level representations with cross-window temporal context. It achieved the highest accuracy among the compared models on both datasets, demonstrating a favourable performance–size trade-off for lightweight EEG-based MDD screening.