Regional-asymmetric Adaptive Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Diagnosis of Autism in Children with Resting-state EEG

Currently, resting-state electroencephalography (rs-EEG) has become an effective and low-cost evaluation way to identify autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in children. However, it is of great challenge to extract useful features from raw rs-EEG data to improve diagnosis performance. Traditional methods mainly rely on the design of manual feature extractors and classifiers, which are separately performed and cannot be optimized simultaneously. To this end, this paper proposes a new end-to-end diagnostic method based on a recently emerged graph convolutional neural network for the diagnosis of ASD in children. Inspired by related neuroscience findings on the abnormal brain functional connectivity and hemispheric asymmetry characteristics observed in autism patients, we design a new Regional-asymmetric Adaptive Graph Convolutional Neural Network (RAGNN). It utilizes a hierarchical feature extraction and fusion process to learn separable spatiotemporal EEG features from different brain regions, two hemispheres, and a global brain. In the temporal feature extraction section, we utilize a convolutional layer that spans from the brain area to the hemisphere. This allows for effectively capturing temporal features both within and between brain areas. To better capture spatial characteristics of multi-channel EEG signals, we employ adaptive graph convolutional learning to capture non-Euclidean features within the brain’s hemispheres. Additionally, an attention layer is introduced to highlight different contributions of the left and right hemispheres, and the fused features are used for classification. We conducted a subject-independent cross-validation experiment on rs-EEG data from 45 children with ASD and 45 typically developing (TD) children. Experimental results have shown that our proposed RAGNN model outperformed several existing deep learning-based methods (ShaollowNet, EEGNet, TSception, ST-GCN, and CGRU-MDGN).