Improving Brain Disorder Diagnosis with Advanced Brain Function Representation and Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Quantifying functional connectivity (FC), a vital metric for the diagnosis of various brain disorders, traditionally relies on the use of a pre-defined brain atlas. However, using such atlases can lead to issues regarding selection bias and lack of regard for specificity. Addressing this, we propose a novel transformer-based classification network (AFBR-KAN) with effective brain function representation to aid in diagnosing autism spectrum disorder (ASD). AFBR-KAN leverages Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) blocks replacing traditional multi-layer perceptron (MLP) components. Thorough experimentation reveals the effectiveness of AFBR-KAN in improving the diagnosis of ASD under various configurations of the model architecture. Our code is available at https://github.com/tbwa233/ABFR-KAN