D-Unet: A symmetric architecture of convolutional neural network with two auxiliary outputs for dementia recognition

Dementia-associated disorders cause damage to the brains of patients and bring huge burdens to individuals and families. Electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring is friendly to patients on account of low cost, non-invasion, and objective. Event-related potential (ERP) is a component of EEG that has huge potential to evaluate the cognitive function of the brain. In this study, we recorded the ERP from patients with dementia and healthy people, then proposed an ERP-based deep learning method to realize dementia recognition via the model Dementia-Unet (D-Unet). To improve the performance of the model, on the base of the decoder and the primary classifier, we added new structures including a symmetric decoder and two auxiliary outputs. One of the auxiliary outputs was input reconstruction, and the other one was aimed at working like the primary classifier with the same task. The results of the experiment of four-fold cross-validation demonstrated the two auxiliary outputs improved the performance of the model effectively. When compared with some other machine learning methods and deep learning methods, our model obtained the best performance with an accuracy of 0.815, a precision of 0.829, a recall of 0.797, and an f1-score of 0.812. Besides, we put up a complex training strategy with all outputs involved, but a simple testing strategy with only a primary classifier working to keep high performance but cut down the complexity burden during testing.