EEG-CLIP : Learning EEG representations from natural language descriptions

Tidiane Camaret Ndir^1,2*Robin Tibor Schirrmeister^1,2*Tonio Ball²

• ¹Medical Physics, Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, Medical Center - University of Freiburg, Faculty of Medicine, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
• ²Neuromedical AI Lab, Department of Neurosurgery, Medical Center - University of Freiburg, Faculty of Medicine, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

Deep networks for electroencephalogram (EEG) decoding are often only trained to solve one specific task, such as pathology or age decoding. A more general task-agnostic approach is to train deep networks to match a (clinical) EEG recording to its corresponding textual medical report and vice versa. This approach was pioneered in the computer vision domain matching images and their text captions and subsequently allowed to do successful zero-shot decoding using textual class prompts. In this work, we follow this approach and develop a contrastive learning framework, EEG-CLIP, that aligns the EEG time series and the descriptions of the corresponding clinical text in a shared embedding space. We investigated its potential for versatile EEG decoding, evaluating performance in a range of few-shot and zero-shot settings. Overall, we show that EEG-CLIP manages to non-trivially align text and EEG representations. Our work presents a promising approach to learn general EEG representations, which could enable easier analyses of diverse decoding questions through zero-shot decoding or training task-specific models from fewer training examples. The code for reproducing our results is available at https://github.com/tidiane-camaret/EEGClip.