An Automated Classifier of Harmful Brain Activities for Clinical Usage Based on a Vision-Inspired Pre-trained Framework

Timely identification of harmful brain activities via electroencephalography (EEG) is critical for brain disease diagnosis and treatment, which remains limited in application due to inter-rater variability, resource constraints, and poor generalizability of existing artificial intelligence models. In this study, we describe an automated classifier, VIPEEGNet, which leverages the advantage of transfer learning from ImageNet-pretrained models to distinguish six types of brain activities. For the development cohort, the recall of VIPEEGNet ranges from 36.8% to 88.2%, and the precision ranges from 55.6% to 80.4%, with performance comparable to that of human experts. Notably, the external testing showed Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) values of 0.223 (public) and 0.273 (private), ranking second among the existing 2767 competing algorithms, while using only 0.7% of the parameters of the top-ranked algorithm. Its minimal parameter requirements and modular design offer a deployable solution for real-time brain monitoring, potentially expanding access to expert-level EEG interpretation in resource-limited settings.