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.
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.
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.