Multi-Scale Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Network Using Brain Partitioning for Major Depressive Disorder Detection

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a prevalent and severe mental disorder, and EEG-based automated detection has become a promising approach for auxiliary screening diagnosis. In this work, we propose a novel multiscale spatiotemporal graph neural network for MDD detection from multichannel EEG signals. Specifically, a left–right hemispheric partitioning prior is used to encode brain functional organization. Based on this partitioning, adaptive graphs are then constructed and graph message passing is performed to model intra-hemispheric interactions. The approach not only incorporates brain functional organization into the learning process but also enhances the extraction of discriminative features related to depressive brain dynamics. The proposed method was validated in a cross-subject scenario on a private resting-state EEG dataset including 54 adult participants (27 MDD patients and 27 healthy controls; age range: 27–48 years). Experimental results on the dataset achieve an accuracy of 92.21%, surpassing the baseline models. Meanwhile, ablation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.