Multimodal and multicontrast image fusion via deep generative models

Recently, it has become progressively more evident that classic diagnostic labels are unable to reliably describe the complexity and variability of several clinical phenotypes. This is particularly true for a broad range of neuropsychiatric illnesses (e.g., depression, anxiety disorders, behavioral phenotypes). Patient heterogeneity can be better described by grouping individuals into novel categories based on empirically derived sections of intersecting continua that span across and beyond traditional categorical borders. In this context, neuroimaging data carry a wealth of spatiotemporally resolved information about each patient's brain. However, they are usually heavily collapsed a priori through procedures which are not learned as part of model training, and consequently not optimized for the downstream prediction task. This is because every individual participant usually comes with multiple whole-brain 3D imaging modalities often accompanied by a deep genotypic and phenotypic characterization, hence posing formidable computational challenges. In this paper we design a deep learning architecture based on generative models rooted in a modular approach and separable convolutional blocks to a) fuse multiple 3D neuroimaging modalities on a voxel-wise level, b) convert them into informative latent embeddings through heavy dimensionality reduction, c) maintain good generalizability and minimal information loss. As proof of concept, we test our architecture on the well characterized Human Connectome Project database demonstrating that our latent embeddings can be clustered into easily separable subject strata which, in turn, map to different phenotypical information which was not included in the embedding creation process. This may be of aid in predicting disease evolution as well as drug response, hence supporting mechanistic disease understanding and empowering clinical trials.

A Comprehensive Survey of Graph-level Learning

Graphs have a superior ability to represent relational data, like chemical compounds, proteins, and social networks. Hence, graph-level learning, which takes a set of graphs as input, has been applied to many tasks including comparison, regression, classification, and more. Traditional approaches to learning a set of graphs tend to rely on hand-crafted features, such as substructures. But while these methods benefit from good interpretability, they often suffer from computational bottlenecks as they cannot skirt the graph isomorphism problem. Conversely, deep learning has helped graph-level learning adapt to the growing scale of graphs by extracting features automatically and decoding graphs into low-dimensional representations. As a result, these deep graph learning methods have been responsible for many successes. Yet, there is no comprehensive survey that reviews graph-level learning starting with traditional learning and moving through to the deep learning approaches. This article fills this gap and frames the representative algorithms into a systematic taxonomy covering traditional learning, graph-level deep neural networks, graph-level graph neural networks, and graph pooling. To ensure a thoroughly comprehensive survey, the evolutions, interactions, and communications between methods from four different branches of development are also examined. This is followed by a brief review of the benchmark data sets, evaluation metrics, and common downstream applications. The survey concludes with 13 future directions of necessary research that will help to overcome the challenges facing this booming field.