Deep neural network to differentiate internet gaming disorder from healthy controls during stop-signal task: a multichannel near-infrared spectroscopy study

Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD), as one of worldwide mental health issues, leads to negative effects on physical and mental health and has attracted public attention. Most studies on IGD are based on screening scales and subjective judgments of doctors, without objective quantitative assessment. However, public understanding of internet gaming disorder lacks objectivity. Therefore, the researches on internet gaming disorder still have many limitations. In this paper, a stop-signal task (SST) was designed to assess inhibitory control in patients with IGD based on prefrontal functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). According to the scale, the subjects were divided into health and gaming disorder. A total of 40 subjects (24 internet gaming disorders; 16 healthy controls) signals were used for deep learning-based classification. The seven algorithms used for classification and comparison were deep learning algorithms (DL) and machine learning algorithms (ML), with four and three algorithms in each category, respectively. After applying hold-out method, the performance of the model was verified by accuracy. DL models outperformed traditional ML algorithms. Furthermore, the classification accuracy of the two-dimensional convolution neural network (2D-CNN) was 87.5% among all models. This was the highest accuracy out of all models that were tested. The 2D-CNN was able to outperform the other models due to its ability to learn complex patterns in data. This makes it well-suited for image classification tasks. The findings suggested that a 2D-CNN model is an effective approach for predicting internet gaming disorder. The results show that this is a reliable method with high accuracy to identify patients with IGD and demonstrate that the use of fNIRS to facilitate the development of IGD diagnosis has great potential.