Automatic Identification of Children with ADHD from EEG Brain Waves

EEG (electroencephalogram) signals could be used reliably to extract critical information regarding ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), a childhood neurodevelopmental disorder. The early detection of ADHD is important to lessen the development of this disorder and reduce its long-term impact. This study aimed to develop a computer algorithm to identify children with ADHD automatically from the characteristic brain waves. An EEG machine learning pipeline is presented here, including signal preprocessing and data preparation steps, with thorough explanations and rationale. A large public dataset of 120 children was selected, containing large variability and minimal measurement bias in data collection and reproducible child-friendly visual attentional tasks. Unlike other studies, EEG linear features were extracted to train a Gaussian SVM-based model from only the first four sub-bands of EEG. This eliminates signals more than 30 Hz, thus reducing the computational load for model training while keeping mean accuracy of ~94%. We also performed rigorous validation (obtained 93.2% and 94.2% accuracy, respectively, for holdout and 10-fold cross-validation) to ensure that the developed model is minimally impacted by bias and overfitting that commonly appear in the ML pipeline. These performance metrics indicate the ability to automatically identify children with ADHD from a local clinical setting and provide a baseline for further clinical evaluation and timely therapeutic attempts.