Brant-X: A Unified Physiological Signal Alignment Framework

Abstract

Physiological signals serve as indispensable clues for understanding various physiological states of human bodies. Most existing works have focused on a single type of physiological signals for a range of application scenarios. However, as the body is a holistic biological system, the inherent interconnection among various physiological data should not be neglected. In particular, given the brain's role as the control center for vital activities, electroencephalogram (EEG) exhibits significant correlations with other physiological signals. Therefore, the correlation between EEG and other physiological signals holds potential to improve performance in various scenarios. Nevertheless, achieving this goal is still constrained by several challenges: the scarcity of simultaneously collected physiological data, the differences in correlations between various signals, and the correlation differences between various tasks. To address these issues, we propose a unified physiological signal alignment framework, Brant-X, to model the correlation between EEG and other signals. Our approach (1) employs the EEG foundation model to data-efficiently transfer the rich knowledge in EEG to other physiological signals, and (2) introduces the two-level alignment to fully align the semantics of EEG and other signals from different semantic scales. In the experiments, Brant-X achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with task-agnostic and task-specific baselines on various downstream tasks in diverse scenarios, including sleep stage classification, emotion recognition, freezing of gaits detection, and eye movement communication. Moreover, the analysis on the arrhythmia detection task and the visualization in case study further illustrate the effectiveness of Brant-X in the knowledge transfer from EEG to other physiological signals. The model's homepage is at https://github.com/zjunet/Brant-X/.