IFC-GNN: Combining interactions of functional connectivity with multimodal graph neural networks for ASD brain disorder analysis

Many studies now indicate that brain disorders are associated with functional connectivity between brain regions, but the impact of interactions among functional connections on diseases remains to be explored. Moreover, existing models for analyzing the temporal and spatial attributes of fMRI data exhibit limitations in their efficacy. Currently, there is an absence of a comprehensive model capable of simultaneously capturing disease-related interactions within functional connectivity, fully leveraging the temporal and spatial characteristics of fMRI, and achieving superior diagnostic accuracy. To address these gaps, we propose a model to classify brain disorders that employs a novel algorithm and multimodal graph convolutional networks to process the temporal and spatial features of fMRI data separately, along with the demographic information. In the proposed model, a deep feature selection algorithm is employed to discover disease-related biomarkers and evaluate their impact on brain disorders. Remarkably, this approach has led to a classification accuracy of 80.66%, which surpasses the performance of graph neural networks by approximately 10%. Notably, our investigations have uncovered novel biomarkers linked to autism, with our findings corroborated by relevant literature. These achievements underscore the model's potential in revealing critical insights pertinent to autism, thereby facilitating groundbreaking experimental research in the field.