Enhancing Schizophrenia Diagnosis Through Multi-View EEG Analysis: Integrating Raw Signals and Spectrograms in a Deep Learning Framework

Abstract

Objective: Schizophrenia is a chronic mental disorder marked by symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, and cognitive impairments, which profoundly affect individuals’ lives. Early detection is crucial for improving treatment outcomes, but the diagnostic process remains complex due to the disorder's multifaceted nature. In recent years, EEG data have been increasingly investigated to detect neural patterns linked to schizophrenia. Methods: This study presents a deep learning framework that integrates both raw multi-channel EEG signals and their spectrograms. Our two-branch model processes these complementary data views to capture both temporal dynamics and frequency-specific features while employing depth-wise convolution to efficiently combine spatial dependencies across EEG channels. Results: The model was evaluated on two datasets, consisting of 84 and 28 subjects, achieving classification accuracies of 0.985 and 0.994, respectively. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining raw EEG signals with their time-frequency representations for precise and automated schizophrenia detection. Additionally, an ablation study assessed the contributions of different architectural components. Conclusions: The approach outperformed existing methods in the literature, underscoring the value of utilizing multi-view EEG data in schizophrenia detection. These promising results suggest that our framework could contribute to more effective diagnostic tools in clinical practice.