Exploring Brain Effective Connectivity Networks Through Spatiotemporal Graph Convolutional Models

Learning brain effective connectivity networks (ECN) from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data has gained much attention in recent years. With the successful applications of deep learning in numerous fields, several brain ECN learning methods based on deep learning have been reported in the literature. However, current methods ignore the deep temporal features of fMRI data and fail to fully employ the spatial topological relationship between brain regions. In this article, we propose a novel method for learning brain ECN based on spatiotemporal graph convolutional models (STGCM), named STGCMEC, in which we first adopt the temporal convolutional network to extract the deep temporal features of fMRI data and utilize the graph convolutional network to update the spatial features of each brain region by aggregating information from neighborhoods, which makes the features of brain regions more discriminative. Then, based on such features of brain regions, we design a joint loss function to guide STGCMEC to learn the brain ECN, which includes a task prediction loss and a graph regularization loss. The experimental results on a simulated dataset and a real Alzheimer’s disease neuroimaging initiative (ADNI) dataset show that the proposed STGCMEC is able to better learn brain ECN compared with some state-of-the-art methods.