In recent years, deep learning methods have shown promising capabilities for extracting informative and discriminative features from electroencephalography (EEG) data. However, several studies have reported that the feature selection process followed by feature extraction can be beneficial to achieve further performance improvement. Even though a recent work achieved promising results by using the single-agent reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework to select task-relevant features in the temporal domain, it still failed to consider other significant features in the spatial-spectral domain. To overcome such limitations, we propose a cooperative multiagent RL-based framework (MARS) that performs feature selection in both the spatial–spectral and temporal domains simultaneously for a motor imagery (MI)-EEG classification task. In this framework, we enable our RL agents to collaborate with each other as a team to solve a complex multiobjective feature selection problem. Furthermore, we adopt a counterfactual advantage function to overcome the free-rider problem, which is associated with the credit assignment issue in multiagent cases. To assess the MARS framework, we conduct extensive experiments with two public MI datasets under subject-dependent and subject-independent scenarios and we apply the MARS to different backbone networks. The experimental results demonstrate that our MARS outperforms other competing methods in terms of mean accuracy and achieves statistically significant improvements.
Recently, the interest in biometric authentication based on electrocardiograms (ECGs) has increased. Nevertheless, the ECG signal of a person may vary according to factors such as the emotional or physical state, thus hindering authentication. We propose an adaptive ECG-based authentication method that performs incremental learning to identify ECG signals from a subject under a variety of measurement conditions. An incremental support vector machine (SVM) is adopted for authentication implementing incremental learning. We collected ECG signals from 11 subjects during 10 min over six days and used the data from days 1 to 5 for incremental learning, and those from day 6 for testing. The authentication results show that the proposed system consistently reduces the false acceptance rate from 6.49% to 4.39% and increases the true acceptance rate from 61.32% to 87.61% per single ECG wave after incremental learning using data from the five days. In addition, the authentication results tested using data obtained a day after the latest training show the false acceptance rate being within reliable range (3.5–5.33%) and improvement of the true acceptance rate (70.05–87.61%) over five days.
Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is a commonly used functional neuroimaging technique to investigate the functional brain networks. However, rs-fMRI data are often contaminated with noise and artifacts that adversely affect the results of rs-fMRI studies. Several machine/deep learning methods have achieved impressive performance to automatically regress the noise-related components decomposed from rs-fMRI data, which are expressed as the pairs of a spatial map and its associated time series. However, most of the previous methods individually analyze each modality of the noise-related components and simply aggregate the decision-level information (or knowledge) extracted from each modality to make a final decision. Moreover, these approaches consider only the limited modalities making it difficult to explore class-discriminative spectral information of noise-related components. To overcome these limitations, we propose a unified deep attentive spatio-spectral-temporal feature fusion framework. We first adopt a learnable wavelet transform module at the input-level of the framework to elaborately explore the spectral information in subsequent processes. We then construct a feature-level multi-modality fusion module to efficiently exchange the information from multi-modality inputs in the feature space. Finally, we design confidence-based voting strategies for decision-level fusion at the end of the framework to make a robust final decision. In our experiments, the proposed method achieved remarkable performance for noise-related component detection on various rs-fMRI datasets.
28 January 2026 in Artificial Intelligence in Medicine