A novel interactive deep cascade spectral graph convolutional network with multi-relational graphs for disease prediction

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have recently grown in popularity for disease prediction. Existing GNN-based methods primarily build the graph topological structure around a single modality and combine it with other modalities to acquire feature representations of acquisitions. The complicated relationship in each modality, however, may not be well highlighted due to its specificity. Further, relatively shallow networks restrict adequate extraction of high-level features, affecting disease prediction performance. Accordingly, this paper develops a new interactive deep cascade spectral graph convolutional network with multi-relational graphs (IDCGN) for disease prediction tasks. Its crucial points lie in constructing multiple relational graphs and dual cascade spectral graph convolution branches with interaction (DCSGBI). Specifically, the former designs a pairwise imaging-based edge generator and a pairwise non-imaging-based edge generator from different modalities by devising two learnable networks, which adaptively capture graph structures and provide various views of the same acquisition to aid in disease diagnosis. Again, DCSGBI is established to enrich high-level semantic information and low-level details of disease data. It devises a cascade spectral graph convolution operator for each branch and incorporates the interaction strategy between different branches into the network, successfully forming a deep model and capturing complementary information from diverse branches. In this manner, more favorable and sufficient features are learned for a reliable diagnosis. Experiments on several disease datasets reveal that IDCGN exceeds state-of-the-art models and achieves promising results.