An Explainable and Efficient Deep Learning Framework for EEG-Based Diagnosis of Alzheimer's and Frontotemporal Dementia

Waqar Khan¹Muhammad Shahbaz Khan²Sultan Noman Qasem^3,4Wad Ghaban⁵Faisal Saeed⁶Muhammad Hanif^7*Jawad Ahmad⁸

• ¹Pakistan Navy Engineering College, National University of Sciences and Technology, Karachi, Islamabad, Pakistan
• ²Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
• ³Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
• ⁴King Salman Center for Disability Research, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
• ⁵University of Tabuk, Tabuk, Tabuk, Saudi Arabia
• ⁶Birmingham City University, Birmingham, United Kingdom
• ⁷Örebro University, Örebro, Örebro, Sweden
• ⁸Prince Mohammad bin Fahd University, Khobar, Saudi Arabia

The early and accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease and Frontotemporal Dementia remains a critical challenge, particularly with traditional machine learning models which often fail to provide transparency in their predictions, reducing user confidence and treatment effectiveness. To address these limitations, this paper introduces an explainable and lightweight deep learning framework comprising temporal convolutional networks and long short-term memory networks that efficiently classifies Frontotemporal dementia (FTD), Alzheimer's Disease (AD), and healthy controls using electroencephalogram (EEG) data. Feature engineering has been conducted using modified Relative Band Power (RBP) analysis, leveraging six EEG frequency bands extracted through power spectrum density (PSD) calculations. The model achieves high classification accuracies of 99.7% for binary tasks and 80.34% for multi-class classification. Furthermore, to enhance the transparency and interpretability of the framework, SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) has been utilised as an explainable artificial intelligence technique that provides insights into feature contributions.