Multi-Scale Spatial-Temporal Attention Networks for Functional Connectome Classification

Many neuropsychiatric disorders are considered to be associated with abnormalities in the functional connectivity networks of the brain. The research on the classification of functional connectivity can therefore provide new perspectives for understanding the pathology of disorders and contribute to early diagnosis and treatment. Functional connectivity exhibits a nature of dynamically changing over time, however, the majority of existing methods are unable to collectively reveal the spatial topology and time-varying characteristics. Furthermore, despite the efforts of limited spatial-temporal studies to capture rich information across different spatial scales, they have not delved into the temporal characteristics among different scales. To address above issues, we propose a novel Multi-Scale Spatial-Temporal Attention Networks (MSSTAN) to exploit the multi-scale spatial-temporal information provided by functional connectome for classification. To fully extract spatial features of brain regions, we propose a Topology Enhanced Graph Transformer module to guide the attention calculations in the learning of spatial features by incorporating topology priors. A Multi-Scale Pooling Strategy is introduced to obtain representations of brain connectome at various scales. Considering the temporal dynamic characteristics between dynamic functional connectome, we employ Locality Sensitive Hashing attention to further capture long-term dependencies in time dynamics across multiple scales and reduce the computational complexity of the original attention mechanism. Experiments on three brain fMRI datasets of MDD and ASD demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach. In addition, benefiting from the attention mechanism in Transformer, our results are interpretable, which can contribute to the discovery of biomarkers. The code is available at https://github.com/LIST-KONG/MSSTAN.