Classification of Brain Disorders in rs-fMRI via Local-to-Global Graph Neural Networks

Recently, functional brain network has been used for the classification of brain disorders, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Existing methods either ignore the non-imaging information associated with the subjects and the relationship between the subjects, or cannot identify and analyze disease-related local brain regions and biomarkers, leading to inaccurate classification results. This paper proposes a local-to-global graph neural network (LG-GNN) to address this issue. A local ROI-GNN is designed to learn feature embeddings of local brain regions and identify biomarkers, and a global Subject-GNN is then established to learn the relationship between the subjects with the embeddings generated by the local ROI-GNN and the non-imaging information. The local ROI-GNN contains a self-attention based pooling module to preserve the embeddings most important for the classification. The global Subject-GNN contains an adaptive weight aggregation block to generate the multi-scale feature embedding corresponding to each subject. The proposed LG-GNN is thoroughly validated using two public datasets for ASD and AD classification. The experimental results demonstrated that it achieves the state-of-the-art performance in terms of various evaluation metrics.