Generative AI Enables EEG Super-Resolution via Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Diffusion Learning

Electroencephalogram (EEG) technology, particularly high-density EEG (HD EEG) devices, is widely used in fields such as neuroscience. HD EEG devices improve the spatial resolution of EEG by placing more electrodes on the scalp, which meet the requirements of clinical diagnostic applications such as epilepsy focus localization. However, this technique faces challenges, such as high acquisition costs and limited usage scenarios. In this paper, spatio-temporal adaptive diffusion models (STAD) are proposed to pioneer the use of diffusion models for achieving spatial SR reconstruction from low-resolution (LR, 64 channels or fewer) EEG to high-resolution (HR, 256 channels) EEG. Specifically, a spatio-temporal condition module is designed to extract the spatio-temporal features of LR EEG, which are then used as conditional inputs to direct the reverse denoising process. Additionally, a multi-scale Transformer denoising module is constructed to leverage multi-scale convolution blocks and cross-attention-based diffusion Transformer blocks for conditional guidance to generate subject-adaptive SR EEG. Experimental results demonstrate that the STAD significantly enhances the spatial resolution of LR EEG and quantitatively outperforms existing methods. Furthermore, STAD demonstrate their value by applying synthetic SR EEG to classification and source localization tasks, indicating their potential to substantially boost the spatial resolution of EEG.