Prediction model for potential depression using sex and age-reflected quantitative EEG biomarkers

Depression is a prevalent mental disorder in modern society, causing many people to suffer or even commit suicide. Psychiatrists and psychologists typically diagnose depression using representative tests, such as the Beck's Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS), in conjunction with patient consultations. Traditional tests, however, are time-consuming, can be trained on patients, and entailed a lot of clinician subjectivity. In the present study, we trained the machine learning models using sex and age-reflected z-score values of quantitative EEG (QEEG) indicators based on data from the National Standard Reference Data Center for Korean EEG, with 116 potential depression subjects and 80 healthy controls. The classification model has distinguished potential depression groups and normal groups, with a test accuracy of up to 92.31% and a 10-cross-validation loss of 0.13. This performance proposes a model with z-score QEEG metrics, considering sex and age as objective and reliable biomarkers for early screening for the potential depression.