Many neuropsychiatric disorders are considered to be associated with abnormalities in the functional connectivity networks of the brain. The research on the classification of functional connectivity can therefore provide new perspectives for understanding the pathology of disorders and contribute to early diagnosis and treatment. Functional connectivity exhibits a nature of dynamically changing over time, however, the majority of existing methods are unable to collectively reveal the spatial topology and time-varying characteristics. Furthermore, despite the efforts of limited spatial-temporal studies to capture rich information across different spatial scales, they have not delved into the temporal characteristics among different scales. To address above issues, we propose a novel Multi-Scale Spatial-Temporal Attention Networks (MSSTAN) to exploit the multi-scale spatial-temporal information provided by functional connectome for classification. To fully extract spatial features of brain regions, we propose a Topology Enhanced Graph Transformer module to guide the attention calculations in the learning of spatial features by incorporating topology priors. A Multi-Scale Pooling Strategy is introduced to obtain representations of brain connectome at various scales. Considering the temporal dynamic characteristics between dynamic functional connectome, we employ Locality Sensitive Hashing attention to further capture long-term dependencies in time dynamics across multiple scales and reduce the computational complexity of the original attention mechanism. Experiments on three brain fMRI datasets of MDD and ASD demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach. In addition, benefiting from the attention mechanism in Transformer, our results are interpretable, which can contribute to the discovery of biomarkers. The code is available at https://github.com/LIST-KONG/MSSTAN.

Multimodal fusion has become an important research technique in neuroscience that completes downstream tasks by extracting complementary information from multiple modalities. Existing multimodal research on brain networks mainly focuses on two modalities, structural connectivity (SC) and functional connectivity (FC). Recently, extensive literature has shown that the relationship between SC and FC is complex and not a simple one-to-one mapping. The coupling of structure and function at the regional level is heterogeneous. However, all previous studies have neglected the modal regional heterogeneity between SC and FC and fused their representations via "simple patterns", which are inefficient ways of multimodal fusion and affect the overall performance of the model. In this paper, to alleviate the issue of regional heterogeneity of multimodal brain networks, we propose a novel Regional Heterogeneous multimodal Brain networks Fusion Strategy (RH-BrainFS). Briefly, we introduce a brain subgraph networks module to extract regional characteristics of brain networks, and further use a new transformer-based fusion bottleneck module to alleviate the issue of regional heterogeneity between SC and FC. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to explicitly state the issue of structural-functional modal regional heterogeneity and to propose a solution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in a variety of neuroscience tasks.

The pathophysiology of major depressive disorder (MDD) has been demonstrated to be highly associated with the dysfunctional integration of brain activity. Existing studies only fuse multi-connectivity information in a one-shot approach and ignore the temporal property of functional connectivity. A desired model should utilize the rich information in multiple connectivities to help improve the performance. In this study, we develop a multi-connectivity representation learning framework to integrate multi-connectivity topological representation from structural connectivity, functional connectivity and dynamic functional connectivities for automatic diagnosis of MDD. Briefly, structural graph, static functional graph and dynamic functional graphs are first computed from the diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) and resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI). Secondly, a novel Multi-Connectivity Representation Learning Network (MCRLN) approach is developed to integrate the multiple graphs with modules of structural-functional fusion and static-dynamic fusion. We innovatively design a Structural-Functional Fusion (SFF) module, which decouples graph convolution to capture modality-specific features and modality-shared features separately for an accurate brain region representation. To further integrate the static graphs and dynamic functional graphs, a novel Static-Dynamic Fusion (SDF) module is developed to pass the important connections from static graphs to dynamic graphs via attention values. Finally, the performance of the proposed approach is comprehensively examined with large cohorts of clinical data, which demonstrates its effectiveness in classifying MDD patients. The sound performance suggests the potential of the MCRLN approach for the clinical use in diagnosis. The code is available at https://github.com/LIST-KONG/MultiConnectivity-master.

Numerous evidence has demonstrated the pathophysiology of a number of mental disorders is intimately associated with abnormal changes of dysfunctional integration of brain network. Functional connectome (FC) exhibits a strong discriminative power for mental disorder identification. However, existing methods are insufficient for modeling both spatial correlation and temporal dynamics of FC. In this study, we propose a novel Spatio-Temporal Attention Graph Convolution Network (STAGCN) for FC classification. In spatial domain, we develop attention enhanced graph convolutional network to take advantage of brain regions’ topological features. Moreover, a novel multi-head self-attention approach is proposed to capture the temporal relationships among different dynamic FC. Extensive experiments on two tasks of mental disorder diagnosis demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed STAGCN.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a common and severe psychiatric illness marked by loss of interest and low energy, which result in the highest burden of disability among all mental disorders. Clinical MDD diagnosis still utilizes the phenomenological approach of syndrome-based interview, which leads to a high rate of misdiagnosis. Therefore, it is highly imperative to explore effective biomarkers to enable precise personalized diagnosis. There still exist two main challenges due to complexity of MDD and individual differences. On the one hand, discriminative features need to be investigated to better reflect the characteristics of MDD. On the other hand, the performance from shallow and static learning models is still not satisfactory. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel Multi-Stage Graph Fusion Networks (MSGFN) for major depressive disorder diagnosis. At first, functional connectivity is calculated to better characterize interactions between white matter and gray matter. Second, multi-stage features are obtained by a deep subspace learning model, and a number of graphs are constructed under the self-expression constraints at each stage. Finally, a novel graph convolutional fusion module is proposed with graph convolutional operations to integrate features and graph at each stage. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed framework. Our source code is available on:https://github.com/LIST-KONG/MSGFN-master.

Phase-generated carrier (PGC) demodulation technology has been widely used in fiber-optic interferometric sensors system in recent years. Nonlinear errors caused by interference noise and parasitic amplitude modulation (AM) are key factors that affect the reliability of traditional PGC demodulation system based on arctangent (PGC-Arctan) algorithm. In order to enhance the reliable performance of PGC demodulation system under the conditions of low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and high parasitic AM interference, an ellipse fitting algorithm based on the Gauss–Newton iteration (GNI) is proposed, which is called the PGC-Arctan-GNI demodulation algorithm. The proposed algorithm uses the Euclidean distance to accurately estimate the geometric parameters of ellipse, which can correct the nonlinear distortion of the demodulated signal. In addition, the PGC demodulation system designed based on GNI algorithm has the advantages of strong antinoise ability, good antiparasitic AM ability, and widely dynamic range of the input signal amplitude. Experimental results show that, compared with the direct demodulation algorithm and the ellipse fitting algorithm based on the least squares (LS) method, the SINAD value of the proposed algorithm is always greater than 30 dB and higher than the other two algorithms under the condition of low SNR. Under the condition that the parasitic AM index$m$changes from 0 to 0.5, the signal-to-noise and distortion ratio (SINAD) curve of the proposed algorithm is more stable than the curves of the other two algorithms, and the fluctuation range of the SINAD value does not exceed 3 dB. This algorithm also has a wider input signal amplitude range than the LS algorithm. Especially, when the amplitude of the measured signal is less than$\pi$/2, the relative amplitude error of the GNI algorithm is less than 2% and significantly smaller than the LS algorithm. Finally, the demodulation results using real measured data in the actual system show that the frequency and amplitude of the demodulated signal are same as the original signal. At the same time, the SNIAD value of this system reaches 67.40 dB, the spurious-free dynamic range value reaches 68.82 dB, and the total harmonic distortion value reaches -68.40 dB@1 KHz. In summary, the proposed PGC-Arctan-GNI algorithm can eliminate system nonlinear errors caused by the parasitic AM, harmonics, and noise interference by estimating the ellipse parameters, thereby effectively enhancing the stability and reliability of the PGC demodulation system.