BPI-GNN: Interpretable brain network-based psychiatric diagnosis and subtyping.

Journal: NeuroImage
Published Date:

Abstract

Converging evidence increasingly suggests that psychiatric disorders, such as major depressive disorder (MDD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD), are not unitary diseases, but rather heterogeneous syndromes that involve diverse, co-occurring symptoms and divergent responses to treatment. This clinical heterogeneity has hindered the progress of precision diagnosis and treatment effectiveness in psychiatric disorders. In this study, we propose BPI-GNN, a new interpretable graph neural network (GNN) framework for analyzing functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI), by leveraging the famed prototype learning. In addition, we introduce a novel generation process of prototype subgraph to discover essential edges of distinct prototypes and employ total correlation (TC) to ensure the independence of distinct prototype subgraph patterns. BPI-GNN can effectively discriminate psychiatric patients and healthy controls (HC), and identify biological meaningful subtypes of psychiatric disorders. We evaluate the performance of BPI-GNN against 11 popular brain network classification methods on three psychiatric datasets and observe that our BPI-GNN always achieves the highest diagnosis accuracy. More importantly, we examine differences in clinical symptom profiles and gene expression profiles among identified subtypes and observe that our identified brain-based subtypes have the clinical relevance. It also discovers the subtype biomarkers that align with current neuro-scientific knowledge.

Authors

  • Kaizhong Zheng
    National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, National Engineering Research Center for Visual Information and Applications, and Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China. Electronic address: kzzheng@stu.xjtu.edu.cn.
  • Shujian Yu
    Computational NeuroEngineering Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA. Electronic address: yusjlcy9011@ufl.edu.
  • Liangjun Chen
    Department of Radiology and BRIC, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
  • Lujuan Dang
    National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, National Engineering Research Center for Visual Information and Applications, and Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China. Electronic address: danglj@xjtu.edu.cn.
  • Badong Chen
    Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, 710049, China.