EEG-ChTABNet: a dual-branch Channel-wise Transformer with Gated Attention-Branch Network for EEG-based classification of dementia

Background/Objectives: Early and accurate discrimination of neurological conditions, dementia, stroke and healthy aging, remains a critical clinical challenge. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive measure of brain dynamics and entropy-based features obtained from multichannel EEG have shown strong discriminative ability. However, existing deep learning approaches do not sufficiently address the combined challenges of small clinical cohorts and high-dimensional entropy feature spaces. In this study, a novel architecture is proposed for multi-class neurological EEG classification under extreme small-sample conditions. Methods: A novel dual-branch Channel-wise Transformer and Attention-Branch Network (EEG-ChTABNet) are pr to classify 19-channel EEG entropy features into three classes (dementia, stroke, healthy control; N = 45; 15 per class). The architecture suggests four new designs. First, the Channel Importance Attention (CIA) block, which adaptively learns to re-weight the importance of electrodes via squeeze-excitation. Second, the dual-branch encoder, which combines the global multi-head self-attention with the local depthwise-separable convolution. Third, the gated sigmoid fusion mechanism. Fourth, the bottleneck residual classification head, to solve overfitting. Eight entropy feature sets: Amplitude-Aware Permutation Entropy (AAPE), Attention Entropy (AttEn), Dispersion Entropy (DisEn), Distribution Entropy (DistrEn), Fluctuation-based Dispersion Entropy (FDispEn), Fuzzy Entropy (FuzEn), Linear Gaussian Estimation of the Conditional Entropy (LinEn), and Symbolic Dynamics (SyDy) were evaluated individually with stratified 5-fold cross-validation on within-fold SMOTE augmentation. Results: EEG-ChTABNet consistently outperformed the baseline Transformer on all 8 feature sets. DisEn and SyDy features yielded peak classification accuracy of 73.3% (AUC: 0.823 and 0.857, respectively) compared to the corresponding baseline of 57.8% and 55.6%. SyDy achieved the best overall AUC of 0.857 and the dementia detection sensitivity was up to 86.7% over multiple feature sets. Conclusions: EEG-ChTABNet shows the effectiveness of channel-adaptive, dual-branch Transformer Designs for EEG-based neurological classification from Small-Sample Entropy Feature Data, and Identifying SyDy and DisEn as the Most Discriminative Feature Representations for Three-Class Neurological EEG Classification.

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