Hierarchical Graph Convolutional Network Built by Multiscale Atlases for Brain Disorder Diagnosis Using Functional ConnectivityFunctional connectivity network (FCN) data from functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) is increasingly used for the diagnoses of brain disorders.
However, state-of-the-art studies used to build the FCN using a single brain
parcellation atlas at a certain spatial scale, which largely neglected
functional interactions across different spatial scales in hierarchical
manners. In this study, we propose a novel framework to perform multiscale FCN
analysis for brain disorder diagnosis. We first use a set of well-defined
multiscale atlases to compute multiscale FCNs. Then, we utilize biologically
meaningful brain hierarchical relationships among the regions in multiscale
atlases to perform nodal pooling across multiple spatial scales, namely
"Atlas-guided Pooling". Accordingly, we propose a Multiscale-Atlases-based
Hierarchical Graph Convolutional Network (MAHGCN), built on the stacked layers
of graph convolution and the atlas-guided pooling, for a comprehensive
extraction of diagnostic information from multiscale FCNs. Experiments on
neuroimaging data from 1792 subjects demonstrate the effectiveness of our
proposed method in the diagnoses of Alzheimer's disease (AD), the prodromal
stage of AD (i.e., mild cognitive impairment [MCI]), as well as autism spectrum
disorder (ASD), with accuracy of 88.9%, 78.6%, and 72.7% respectively. All
results show significant advantages of our proposed method over other competing
methods. This study not only demonstrates the feasibility of brain disorder
diagnosis using resting-state fMRI empowered by deep learning, but also
highlights that the functional interactions in the multiscale brain hierarchy
are worth being explored and integrated into deep learning network
architectures for better understanding the neuropathology of brain disorders.
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