Spatio-Temporal Evolutionary Graph Learning for Brain Network Analysis Using Medical Imaging

Dynamic functional brain network (DFBN) can flexibly describe the time-varying topological connectivity patterns of the brain, and show great potential in brain disease diagnosis. However, most of the existing DFBN analysis methods focus on capturing the dynamic interaction at the brain region level, ignoring the spatio-temporal topological evolution across time windows. Moreover, they are difficult to suppress interfering connections in DFBNs, which leads to a diminished capacity for discerning the intrinsic structures that are intimately linked to brain disorders. To address these issues, we propose a topological evolution graph learning model to capture disease-related spatio-temporal topological features in DFBNs. Specifically, we first take the hubness of adjacent DFBN as the source domain and the target domain in turn, and then use Wasserstein distance (WD) and Gromov-Wasserstein distance (GWD) to capture the brain’s evolution law at the node and edge levels, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce the principle of relevant information to guide the topology evolution graph to learn the structures that are most relevant to brain diseases yet least redundant information between adjacent DFBNs. On this basis, we develop a high-order spatio-temporal model with multi-hop graph convolution to collaboratively extract long-range spatial and temporal dependencies from the topological evolution graph. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods, and can effectively reveal the information evolution mechanism between brain regions across windows.