BrainMAP: Learning Multiple Activation Pathways in Brain Networks

TL;DR

BrainMAP is a novel framework that uses sequential models and Mixture of Experts to learn multiple activation pathways in brain networks from fMRI data, improving analysis of brain activity and interpretability.

Contribution

It introduces BrainMAP, a new method combining sequential modeling and MoE to capture long-range and multiple pathways in brain networks, addressing limitations of traditional GNNs.

Findings

BrainMAP outperforms existing methods in experiments.

It enables identification of key brain regions involved in tasks.

Provides interpretable insights into brain activation pathways.

Abstract

Functional Magnetic Resonance Image (fMRI) is commonly employed to study human brain activity, since it offers insight into the relationship between functional fluctuations and human behavior. To enhance analysis and comprehension of brain activity, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely applied to the analysis of functional connectivities (FC) derived from fMRI data, due to their ability to capture the synergistic interactions among brain regions. However, in the human brain, performing complex tasks typically involves the activation of certain pathways, which could be represented as paths across graphs. As such, conventional GNNs struggle to learn from these pathways due to the long-range dependencies of multiple pathways. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel framework BrainMAP to learn Multiple Activation Pathways in Brain networks. BrainMAP leverages sequential models to identify long-range correlations among sequentialized brain regions and incorporates an aggregation module based on Mixture of Experts (MoE) to learn from multiple pathways. Our comprehensive experiments highlight BrainMAP's superior performance. Furthermore, our framework enables explanatory analyses of crucial brain regions involved in tasks. Our code is provided at https://github.com/LzyFischer/Graph-Mamba.