NeuroTree: Hierarchical Functional Brain Pathway Decoding for Mental Health Disorders

Analyzing functional brain networks using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is crucial for understanding psychiatric disorders and addictive behaviors. While existing fMRI-based graph convolutional networks (GCNs) show considerable promise for feature extraction, they often fall short in characterizing complex relationships between brain regions and demographic factors and accounting for interpretable variables linked to psychiatric conditions. We propose NeuroTree to overcome these limitations, integrating a k-hop AGE-GCN with neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs). This framework leverages an attention mechanism to optimize functional connectivity (FC), thereby enhancing dynamic FC feature learning for brain disease classification. Furthermore, NeuroTree effectively decodes fMRI network features into tree structures, which improves the capture of high-order brain regional pathway features and enables the identification of hierarchical neural behavioral patterns essential for understanding disease-related brain subnetworks. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that NeuroTree achieves state-of-the-art performance across two distinct mental disorder datasets and provides valuable insights into age-related deterioration patterns. These findings underscore the model's efficacy in predicting psychiatric disorders and elucidating their underlying neural mechanisms.

Identification of Craving Maps among Marijuana Users via Analysis of Functional Brain Networks with High-Order Attention Graph Neural Networks

The consumption of high doses of marijuana can have significant psychological and social impacts. In this study, we propose an interpretable novel framework called the HOGAB (High-Order Graph Attention Neural Networks) model for addictive Marijuana classification and analysis of the localized network clusters that demonstrated abnormal brain activities among chronic marijuana users. The HOGAB integrates dynamic intrinsic functional networks with LSTM technology to capture temporal patterns in fMRI time series of marijuana users. We employed the high-order attention module in neighborhood nodes for information fusion and message passing, enhancing community clustering analysis for long-term marijuana users. Furthermore, we improve the overall classification ability of the model by incorporating attention mechanisms, achieving an AUC of 85.1% and an accuracy of 80.7% in classification, higher than the comparison algoirthms. Specifically, we identified the most relevant subnetworks and cognitive regions that are influenced by persistent marijuana usage, revealing that chronic marijuana consumption adversely affects cognitive control, particularly within the Dorsal Attention and Frontoparietal networks, which are essential for attentional, cognitive and higher cognitive functions. The results show that our proposed model is capable of accurately predicting craving bahavior and identifying brain maps associated with long-term cravings, and thus pinpointing brain regions that are important for analysis.