Interpretable Neuropsychiatric Diagnosis via Concept-Guided Graph Neural Networks
This work addresses the need for accurate and interpretable diagnostic tools for mental health conditions in adolescents, offering a domain-informed approach that enhances clinical translation.
The paper tackles the problem of interpretable neuropsychiatric diagnosis from resting-state fMRI data by proposing CONCEPTNEURO, a concept-guided graph neural network framework that leverages large language models and domain knowledge to generate interpretable connectivity concepts, resulting in improved accuracy over vanilla GNNs and providing transparent explanations aligned with clinical insights.
Nearly one in five adolescents currently live with a diagnosed mental or behavioral health condition, such as anxiety, depression, or conduct disorder, underscoring the urgency of developing accurate and interpretable diagnostic tools. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) provides a powerful lens into large-scale functional connectivity, where brain regions are modeled as nodes and inter-regional synchrony as edges, offering clinically relevant biomarkers for psychiatric disorders. While prior works use graph neural network (GNN) approaches for disorder prediction, they remain complex black-boxes, limiting their reliability and clinical translation. In this work, we propose CONCEPTNEURO, a concept-based diagnosis framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and neurobiological domain knowledge to automatically generate, filter, and encode interpretable functional connectivity concepts. Each concept is represented as a structured subgraph linking specific brain regions, which are then passed through a concept classifier. Our design ensures predictions through clinically meaningful connectivity patterns, enabling both interpretability and strong predictive performance. Extensive experiments across multiple psychiatric disorder datasets demonstrate that CONCEPTNEURO-augmented GNNs consistently outperform their vanilla counterparts, improving accuracy while providing transparent, clinically aligned explanations. Furthermore, concept analyses highlight disorder-specific connectivity patterns that align with expert knowledge and suggest new hypotheses for future investigation, establishing CONCEPTNEURO as an interpretable, domain-informed framework for psychiatric disorder diagnosis.