Multi-modal Dynamic Graph Network: Coupling Structural and Functional Connectome for Disease Diagnosis and Classification
This work addresses disease diagnosis in neuroimaging by improving classification accuracy for conditions like MCI, PD, and schizophrenia, representing an incremental advance in graph-based methods for multi-modal brain networks.
The paper tackled the challenge of modeling interactions in heterogeneous multi-modal brain networks for disease diagnosis by proposing a Multi-modal Dynamic Graph Convolution Network (MDGCN), achieving accuracies of 90.4% for MCI, 85.9% for PD, and 98.3% for schizophrenia classification.
Multi-modal neuroimaging technology has greatlly facilitated the efficiency and diagnosis accuracy, which provides complementary information in discovering objective disease biomarkers. Conventional deep learning methods, e.g. convolutional neural networks, overlook relationships between nodes and fail to capture topological properties in graphs. Graph neural networks have been proven to be of great importance in modeling brain connectome networks and relating disease-specific patterns. However, most existing graph methods explicitly require known graph structures, which are not available in the sophisticated brain system. Especially in heterogeneous multi-modal brain networks, there exists a great challenge to model interactions among brain regions in consideration of inter-modal dependencies. In this study, we propose a Multi-modal Dynamic Graph Convolution Network (MDGCN) for structural and functional brain network learning. Our method benefits from modeling inter-modal representations and relating attentive multi-model associations into dynamic graphs with a compositional correspondence matrix. Moreover, a bilateral graph convolution layer is proposed to aggregate multi-modal representations in terms of multi-modal associations. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in terms of disease classification, with the accuracy of 90.4%, 85.9% and 98.3% in predicting Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), Parkinson's disease (PD), and schizophrenia (SCHZ) respectively. Furthermore, our statistical evaluations on the correspondence matrix exhibit a high correspondence with previous evidence of biomarkers.