MDDBranchNet: A Deep Learning Model for Detecting Major Depressive Disorder Using ECG Signal

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a chronic mental illness which affects people's well-being and is often detected at a later stage of depression with a likelihood of suicidal ideation. Early detection of MDD is thus necessary to reduce the impact, however, it requires monitoring vitals in daily living conditions. EEG is generally multi-channel and due to difficulty in signal acquisition, it is unsuitable for home-based monitoring, whereas, wearable sensors can collect single-channel ECG. Classical machine-learning based MDD detection studies commonly use various heart rate variability features. Feature generation, which requires domain knowledge, is often challenging, and requires computation power, often unsuitable for real time processing, MDDBranchNet is a proposed parallel-branch deep learning model for MDD binary classification from a single channel ECG which uses additional ECG-derived signals such as R-R signal and degree distribution time series of horizontal visibility graph. The use of derived branches was able to increase the model's accuracy by around 7%. An optimal 20-second overlapped segmentation of ECG recording was found to be beneficial with a 70% prediction threshold for maximum MDD detection with a minimum false positive rate. The proposed model evaluated MDD prediction from signal excerpts, irrespective of location (first, middle or last one-third of the recording), instead of considering the entire ECG signal with minimal performance variation stressing the idea that MDD phenomena are likely to manifest uniformly throughout the recording.