Nadia Mammone | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

LEAD: An EEG Foundation Model for Alzheimer's Disease Detection

Electroencephalography (EEG) provides a non-invasive, highly accessible, and cost-effective approach for detecting Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, existing methods, whether based on handcrafted feature engineering or standard deep learning, face three major challenges: 1) the lack of large-scale EEG-based AD datasets for robust representation learning; 2) limited generalizability across subjects; and 3) difficulty in adapting to highly heterogeneous data. To address these challenges, we curate the world's largest EEG-AD corpus to date, comprising 2,238 subjects. Leveraging this unique resource, we propose LEAD, the first large-scale foundation model for EEG-based AD detection. Specifically, we design a gated temporal-spatial Transformer that can adapt to EEG recordings with arbitrary lengths, channel configurations, and sampling rates. In addition, we introduce a subject-regularized training strategy to enhance subject-level feature learning. We further employ medical contrastive learning for pre-training on 13 datasets, including 4 AD datasets and 9 non-AD neurological disorder datasets, and fine-tune/test the model on the other 5 AD datasets. LEAD achieves the best average ranking across all 20 evaluations on 5 downstream datasets, substantially outperforming existing approaches, including state-of-the-art (SOTA) EEG foundation models. These results strongly demonstrate the effectiveness and practical potential of the proposed method for real-world EEG-based AD detection. Source code: https://github.com/DL4mHealth/LEAD

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arXiv2025

ADformer: A Multi-Granularity Spatial-Temporal Transformer for EEG-Based Alzheimer Detection

Electroencephalography (EEG) has emerged as a cost-effective and efficient tool to support neurologists in the detection of Alzheimer's Disease (AD). However, most existing approaches rely heavily on manual feature engineering or data transformation. While such techniques may provide benefits when working with small-scale datasets, they often lead to information loss and distortion when applied to large-scale data, ultimately limiting model performance. Moreover, the limited subject scale and demographic diversity of datasets used in prior studies hinder comprehensive evaluation of model robustness and generalizability, thus restricting their applicability in real-world clinical settings. To address these challenges, we propose ADformer, a novel multi-granularity spatial-temporal transformer designed to capture both temporal and spatial features from raw EEG signals, enabling effective end-to-end representation learning. Our model introduces multi-granularity embedding strategies across both spatial and temporal dimensions, leveraging a two-stage intra-inter granularity self-attention mechanism to learn both local patterns within each granularity and global dependencies across granularities. We evaluate ADformer on 4 large-scale datasets comprising a total of 1,713 subjects, representing one of the largest corpora for EEG-based AD detection to date, under a cross-validated, subject-independent setting. Experimental results demonstrate that ADformer consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving subject-level F1 scores of 92.82%, 89.83%, 67.99%, and 83.98% on the 4 datasets, respectively, in distinguishing AD from healthy control (HC) subjects.

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