Functional brain connectivity networks capture complex relationships and temporal evolution between brain regions, which have become increasingly important for diagnosing neurological disorders. However, existing methods, which are primarily based on vector or graph representations, struggle to adequately characterize the intricate spatio-temporal topological architecture of functional brain networks. Additionally, they predominantly rely on data-driven paradigms and lack priors pertaining to cross-windows network interactions. To address these issues, we propose a spatio-temporal hypergraph attention network framework for brain network analysis. Specifically, we first propose a temporal attention network architecture embedded with temporal similarity-driven prior knowledge, which effectively extracts long-range dependency information from fMRI by combining multi-head self-attention mechanisms and cross-window temporal prior knowledge. Second, we design a hierarchical hypergraph generation module that fuses local and global brain topological information to achieve multi-scale modeling of high-order spatio-temporal structures. Additionally, the spatial attention network, developed based on transformer architecture, employs hypergraph message passing mechanisms to effectively construct multi-level spatial interaction relationships between brain regions. Finally, a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) is adopted for classification. Experiments on the ADNI and PD datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches in diagnostic performance and provides discriminative graph features for relevant brain disease diagnosis.

Multi-modal learning is extensively applied to diagnose brain diseases such as epilepsy and Alzheimer's disease. However, incomplete multi-modal data, where some modalities are unavailable or difficult to collect, limits the effectiveness of conventional methods. Additionally, existing approaches often overlook semantic relationships between neighbors with the same-label and latent information in missing modalities. To address these challenges, we propose an adjacent-aware distillation recovery framework designed for incomplete multi-modal learning, with a focus on diagnosing representative brain diseases, i.e. epilepsy and Alzheimer's disease. The key novelty of our framework lies in its joint design of adjacent-aware modality recovery and multi-modal representation learning in a single end-to-end pipeline. Specifically, we introduce a label-guided adjacent-aware recovery module that uses a self-attention mechanism to exploit neighbor semantics and generate distribution-consistent features for high-quality modality reconstruction. The recovered features are then refined through a knowledge distillation pathway into a modality generator, enhancing generalization under severe data incompleteness. For multi-modal representation learning, the recovered modality information is fused with the original incomplete information to enhance feature extraction and representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in diagnosing epilepsy and Alzheimer's disease.

Dynamic functional brain networks (DFBNs) are powerful tools in neuroscience research. Recent studies reveal that DFBNs contain heterogeneous neural nodes with more extensive connections and more drastic temporal changes, which play pivotal roles in coordinating the reorganization of the brain. Moreover, the spatio-temporal patterns of these nodes are modulated by the brain's historical states. However, existing methods not only ignore the spatio-temporal heterogeneity of neural nodes, but also fail to effectively encode the temporal propagation mechanism of heterogeneous activities. These limitations hinder the deep exploration of spatio-temporal relationships within DFBNs, preventing the capture of abnormal neural heterogeneity caused by brain diseases. To address these challenges, this paper propose a neuro-heterogeneity guided temporal graph learning strategy (NeuroH-TGL). Specifically, we first develop a spatio-temporal pattern decoupling module to disentangle DFBNs into topological consistency networks and temporal trend networks that align with the brain's operational mechanisms. Then, we introduce a heterogeneity mining module to identify pivotal heterogeneity nodes that drive brain reorganization from the two decoupled networks. Finally, we design temporal propagation graph convolution to simulate the influence of the historical states of heterogeneity nodes on the current topology, thereby flexibly extracting heterogeneous spatio-temporal information from the brain. Experiments show that our method surpasses several state-of-the-art methods, and can identify abnormal heterogeneous nodes caused by brain diseases.

Electroencephalography (EEG) biometrics draws increasing attention in high-security requirements due to its advantages of anti-spoofing, live traits, and non-duplicated. However, existing EEG datasets, which rely on external stimuli or task-specific instructions for data collection, often intertwine identity-related information with biases such as emotional states, cognitive tasks, and disease markers. Besides, EEG signals are time-varying, while identity information within EEG signals is relatively fixed, which poses challenges for extracting identity features from EEG to perform accurate person identification. This high correlation hampers the promotion of brainprint recognition in real-life applications. In this paper, we propose a disentangled representation learning based identity recognition framework, which disentangles the EEG signal into intrinsic identity-related information and biased identity-invariant information, thus enhancing the performance of EEG biometrics. First, two parallel encoders are used to extract intrinsic identity-relevant and bias identity-irrelevant factors, respectively, and each encoder consists of a temporal filter module and a novel spatial-temporal attention module. Then, we further refine the disentanglement process through a correlation-driven loss that minimizes factor similarity across spatial-temporal and global representational domains. Adversarial training and reconstruction regularization are introduced to facilitate the identity and biased representations to be independent and complementary to each other. Additionally, we extend supervised contrastive learning to the component level, minimizing cross-component similarity and encouraging each component to independently reflect its unique information, thereby improving the disentanglement efficacy. Our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse datasets encompassing emotional, motor imagery, and pathological conditions, demonstrating the robustness and effectiveness of our proposed brainprint identity recognition model.

Dynamic functional brain network (DFBN) can flexibly describe the time-varying topological connectivity patterns of the brain, and show great potential in brain disease diagnosis. However, most of the existing DFBN analysis methods focus on capturing the dynamic interaction at the brain region level, ignoring the spatio-temporal topological evolution across time windows. Moreover, they are difficult to suppress interfering connections in DFBNs, which leads to a diminished capacity for discerning the intrinsic structures that are intimately linked to brain disorders. To address these issues, we propose a topological evolution graph learning model to capture disease-related spatio-temporal topological features in DFBNs. Specifically, we first take the hubness of adjacent DFBN as the source domain and the target domain in turn, and then use Wasserstein distance (WD) and Gromov-Wasserstein distance (GWD) to capture the brain's evolution law at the node and edge levels, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce the principle of relevant information to guide the topology evolution graph to learn the structures that are most relevant to brain diseases yet least redundant information between adjacent DFBNs. On this basis, we develop a high-order spatio-temporal model with multi-hop graph convolution to collaboratively extract long-range spatial and temporal dependencies from the topological evolution graph. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods, and can effectively reveal the information evolution mechanism between brain regions across windows.

The dynamic functional brain network (DFBN) inherently captures topological changes in brain connectivity pattern during activity, attracting increasing attention for detecting brain disorders. However, most current DFBN analysis methods rely on data-driven modeling and ignore crucial prior knowledge of brain structure and function, resulting in weak interpretability of models. Furthermore, effectively extracting dynamic topological features from DFBN is still a challenging issue, due to its intricate spatio-temporal features coupling. In this paper, we propose an interpretable spatio-temporal tensor graph convolutional network for DFBN analysis. Firstly, by incorporating functional and structural priors into the construction of DBFN, we develop a hierarchical DBFN representation with brain region clustering that effectively captures the spatio-temporal topology among subnetworks. Secondly, we design a tensor graph convolutional network with both intra-graph propagation and inter-graph propagation to simultaneously extract the spatio-temporal features from the hierarchical DFBN. Additionally, we derive a functional subnetwork constraint to enhance the consistency within subnetworks and the differences between subnetworks, which guides the learned features to better reflect the topology prior of the brain network. Finally, self-attention is employed to fuse the learned dynamic topological features of different subnetworks for classification. Experimental results on epilepsy, ADNI and ABIDE datasets demonstrate that our method achieves competitive diagnostic performance and offers network-level interpretability for brain disease diagnosis.

Dynamic brain network has the advantage over static brain network in characterizing the variation pattern of functional brain connectivity, and it has attracted increasing attention in brain disease diagnosis. However, most of the existing dynamic brain networks analysis methods rely on extracting features from independent brain networks divided by sliding windows, making them hard to reveal the high-order dynamic evolution laws of functional brain networks. Additionally, they cannot effectively extract the spatio-temporal topology features in dynamic brain networks. In this paper, we propose to use optimal transport (OT) theory to capture the topology evolution of the dynamic brain networks, and develop a multi-channel spatio-temporal graph convolutional network that collaboratively extracts the temporal and spatial features from the evolution networks. Specifically, we first adaptively evaluate the graph hubness of brain regions in the brain network of each time window, which comprehensively models information transmission among multiple brain regions. Second, the hubness propagation information across adjacent time windows is captured by optimal transport, describing high-order topology evolution of dynamic brain networks. Moreover, we develop a spatio-temporal graph convolutional network with attention mechanism to collaboratively extract the intrinsic temporal and spatial topology information from the above networks. Finally, the multi-layer perceptron is adopted for classifying the dynamic brain network. The extensive experiment on the collected epilepsy dataset and the public ADNI dataset show that our proposed method not only outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in brain disease diagnosis, but also reveals the key dynamic alterations of brain connectivities between patients and healthy controls.