Nan Wang

Liang Peng, Nan Wang, Jie Xu et al.

In this work, we focus on the challenging task, neuro-disease classification, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In population graph-based disease analysis, graph convolutional neural networks (GCNs) have achieved remarkable success. However, these achievements are inseparable from abundant labeled data and sensitive to spurious signals. To improve fMRI representation learning and classification under a label-efficient setting, we propose a novel and theory-driven self-supervised learning (SSL) framework on GCNs, namely Graph CCA for Temporal self-supervised learning on fMRI analysis GATE. Concretely, it is demanding to design a suitable and effective SSL strategy to extract formation and robust features for fMRI. To this end, we investigate several new graph augmentation strategies from fMRI dynamic functional connectives (FC) for SSL training. Further, we leverage canonical-correlation analysis (CCA) on different temporal embeddings and present the theoretical implications. Consequently, this yields a novel two-step GCN learning procedure comprised of (i) SSL on an unlabeled fMRI population graph and (ii) fine-tuning on a small labeled fMRI dataset for a classification task. Our method is tested on two independent fMRI datasets, demonstrating superior performance on autism and dementia diagnosis.

Jinlong Hu, Yangmin Huang, Nan Wang et al.

Deep learning methods have advanced quickly in brain imaging analysis over the past few years, but they are usually restricted by the limited labeled data. Pre-trained model on unlabeled data has presented promising improvement in feature learning in many domains, including natural language processing and computer vision. However, this technique is under-explored in brain network analysis. In this paper, we focused on pre-training methods with Transformer networks to leverage existing unlabeled data for brain functional network classification. First, we proposed a Transformer-based neural network, named as BrainNPT, for brain functional network classification. The proposed method leveraged <cls> token as a classification embedding vector for the Transformer model to effectively capture the representation of brain network. Second, we proposed a pre-training framework for BrainNPT model to leverage unlabeled brain network data to learn the structure information of brain networks. The results of classification experiments demonstrated the BrainNPT model without pre-training achieved the best performance with the state-of-the-art models, and the BrainNPT model with pre-training strongly outperformed the state-of-the-art models. The pre-training BrainNPT model improved 8.75% of accuracy compared with the model without pre-training. We further compared the pre-training strategies, analyzed the influence of the parameters of the model, and interpreted the trained model.

Liang Peng, Nan Wang, Nicha Dvornek et al.

Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNs) are widely used for graph analysis. Specifically, in medical applications, GCNs can be used for disease prediction on a population graph, where graph nodes represent individuals and edges represent individual similarities. However, GCNs rely on a vast amount of data, which is challenging to collect for a single medical institution. In addition, a critical challenge that most medical institutions continue to face is addressing disease prediction in isolation with incomplete data information. To address these issues, Federated Learning (FL) allows isolated local institutions to collaboratively train a global model without data sharing. In this work, we propose a framework, FedNI, to leverage network inpainting and inter-institutional data via FL. Specifically, we first federatively train missing node and edge predictor using a graph generative adversarial network (GAN) to complete the missing information of local networks. Then we train a global GCN node classifier across institutions using a federated graph learning platform. The novel design enables us to build more accurate machine learning models by leveraging federated learning and also graph learning approaches. We demonstrate that our federated model outperforms local and baseline FL methods with significant margins on two public neuroimaging datasets.

Nan Wang, Dirk Jancke, Laurenz Wiskott

Spontaneous cortical activity -- the ongoing cortical activities in absence of intentional sensory input -- is considered to play a vital role in many aspects of both normal brain functions and mental dysfunctions. We present a centered Gaussian-binary Deep Boltzmann Machine (GDBM) for modeling the activity in early cortical visual areas and relate the random sampling in GDBMs to the spontaneous cortical activity. After training the proposed model on natural image patches, we show that the samples collected from the model's probability distribution encompass similar activity patterns as found in the spontaneous activity. Specifically, filters having the same orientation preference tend to be active together during random sampling. Our work demonstrates the centered GDBM is a meaningful model approach for basic receptive field properties and the emergence of spontaneous activity patterns in early cortical visual areas. Besides, we show empirically that centered GDBMs do not suffer from the difficulties during training as GDBMs do and can be properly trained without the layer-wise pretraining.