MM-GTUNets: Unified Multi-Modal Graph Deep Learning for Brain Disorders Prediction

Graph deep learning (GDL) has demonstrated impressive performance in predicting population-based brain disorders (BDs) through the integration of both imaging and non-imaging data. However, the effectiveness of GDL-based methods heavily depends on the quality of modeling multi-modal population graphs and tends to degrade as the graph scale increases. Moreover, these methods often limit interactions between imaging and non-imaging data to node-edge interactions within the graph, overlooking complex inter-modal correlations and resulting in suboptimal outcomes. To address these challenges, we propose MM-GTUNets, an end-to-end Graph Transformer-based multi-modal graph deep learning (MMGDL) framework designed for large-scale brain disorders prediction. To effectively utilize rich multi-modal disease-related information, we introduce Modality Reward Representation Learning (MRRL), which dynamically constructs population graphs using an Affinity Metric Reward System (AMRS). We also employ a variational autoencoder to reconstruct latent representations of non-imaging features aligned with imaging features. Based on this, we introduce Adaptive Cross-Modal Graph Learning (ACMGL), which captures critical modality-specific and modality-shared features through a unified GTUNet encoder, taking advantages of Graph UNet and Graph Transformer, along with a feature fusion module. We validated our method on two public multi-modal datasets ABIDE and ADHD-200, demonstrating its superior performance in diagnosing BDs. Our code is available at https://github.com/NZWANG/MM-GTUNets.