Learning a Phenotypic-Attribute Attentional Brain Connectivity Embedding for ADHD Classification using rs-fMRI

Automated diagnosis of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) from brain's functional imaging has gained more interest due to its high prevalence rates among children. While phenotypic information, such as age and gender, is known to be important in diagnosing ADHD and critically affects the representation derived from fMRI brain images, limited studies have integrated phenotypic information when learning discriminative embedding from brain imaging for such an automatic classification task. In this work, we propose to integrate age and gender attributes through attention mechanism that is jointly optimized when learning a brain connectivity embedding using convolutional variational autoencoder derived from resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data. Our proposed framework achieves a state-of-the-art average of 86.22% accuracy in ADHD vs. typical develop control (TDC) binary classification task evaluated across five public ADHD-200 competition datasets. Furthermore, our analysis points out that there are insufficient linked connections to the brain region of precuneus in the ADHD group.