Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used in various graph-related problems such as node classification and graph classification, where the superior performance is mainly established when natural node features are available.
Brain networks characterize complex connectivities among brain regions as graph structures, which provide a powerful means to study brain diseases. In recent years, graph neural networks have emerged as a prevalent paradigm of learning with structured data.
Human brains lie at the core of complex neurobiological systems, where the neurons, circuits, and subsystems interact in enigmatic ways. Understanding the structural and functional mechanisms of the brain has long been an intriguing pursuit for neuroscience research and clinical disorder therapy.
Mapping the connectome of the human brain using structural or functional connectivity has become one of the most pervasive paradigms for neuroimaging analysis. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) motivated from geometric deep learning have attracted broad interest due to their established power for modeling complex networked data.
Multimodal brain networks characterize complex connectivities among different brain regions from both structural and functional aspects and provide a new means for mental disease analysis. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a de facto model for analyzing graph-structured data.
Recent studies in neuroscience show great potential of functional brain networks constructed from fMRI data for popularity modeling and clinical predictions. However, existing functional brainnetworks are noisy and unaware of down stream prediction tasks, while also incompatible with recent powerful machine learning models of GNNs.
Recent years have seen a growing interest in Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL), which trains Graph Neural Network (GNN) model to discriminate similar and dissimilar pairs of nodes without human annotations. Most prior GCL work focuses on homogeneous graphs and little attention has been paid to Heterogeneous Graphs (HGs) that involve different types of nodes and edges.
Interpretable brain network models for disease prediction are of great value for the advancementof neuroscience. GNNs are promising to model complicated network data, but they are prone to overfitting and suffer from poor interpretability, which prevents their usage in decision-critical scenarios like healthcare.