EEG-SSFormer: Towards a Robust Mamba-Based Architecture for Dementia Detection from Resting State Electroencephalography

Resting-state electroencephalography (rs-EEG) offers a cost effective and portable alternative to conventional neuroimaging for dementia screening, yet the lengthy, multichannel nature of rs-EEG makes learning robust representations challenging. Convolutional and Transformer based architectures dominate current deep learning based approaches, but often struggle with long-range dependencies and may not properly preserve channel-dependent features. In this work, we propose EEG-SSFormer, a state space model based architecture designed for the classification of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia from normal controls using raw rs-EEG signals. Our method decouples channel-wise representation learning from modeling cross-channel interactions and leverages Mamba layers for effective long-sequence modeling. We evaluate our method on the Chung-Ang University EEG dataset (CAUEEG) with 1,155 subjects, the largest public rs-EEG dataset for challenging MCI and dementia differential diagnosis. We achieve a 3-class accuracy of 57.65% using a strict subject-wise split, and relate task-specific features learned by our model as revealed by feature occlusion-based explainability techniques to clinical literature, highlighting that state space models can facilitate interpretable and scalable clinical rs-EEG screening tools for cognitive degeneration. The code for the study is publicly available at: https://github.com/HealthX-Lab/EEG-DimentiaMamba-official.