用神经路径模型揭示脑结构如何支撑功能连接,助力认知与疾病研究。
NeuroPath: A Neural Pathway Transformer for Joining the Dots of Human Connectomes
- 基于结构-功能耦合机制,设计多跳路径注意力模型捕捉高阶拓扑特征。
- 在HCP和UK Biobank数据上实现领先性能,支持任务识别与零样本诊断。
- 模型融合神经科学先验,适合脑网络分析、疾病筛查等应用。
尽管现代成像技术可实时观测两脑区间的连接,但脑结构如何支持功能及自发活动如何引发认知仍不清晰。现有机器学习方法虽能建立影像数据与表型的非线性映射,却缺乏神经科学洞见,难以从瞬态神经活动理解行为。为此,本文聚焦结构连接(SC)与功能连接(FC)的耦合机制,将该问题建模为高阶拓扑的图表示学习。提出拓扑迂回(topological detour)概念,刻画一个普遍存在的直接功能连接如何由结构物理布线的迂回路径支持,形成结构-功能循环互作。在此基础上,借鉴Transformer的多头自注意力机制,设计新型多跳路径注意力,从成对的SC和FC图中捕获多模态特征表示。由此提出生物启发的深度模型NeuroPath,从海量神经影像中提取潜在的连接组特征,可嵌入任务识别、疾病诊断等多种下游任务。在大规模公开数据集HCP与UK Biobank上进行监督与零样本学习验证,结果表明其性能达到当前最优,展现出在连接组神经科学中的巨大潜力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Although modern imaging technologies allow us to study connectivity between two distinct brain regions in-vivo, an in-depth understanding of how anatomical structure supports brain function and how spontaneous functional fluctuations emerge remarkable cognition is still elusive. Meanwhile, tremendous efforts have been made in the realm of machine learning to establish the nonlinear mapping between neuroimaging data and phenotypic traits. However, the absence of neuroscience insight in the current approaches poses significant challenges in understanding cognitive behavior from transient neural activities. To address this challenge, we put the spotlight on the coupling mechanism of structural connectivity (SC) and functional connectivity (FC) by formulating such network neuroscience question into an expressive graph representation learning problem for high-order topology. Specifically, we introduce the concept of topological detour to characterize how a ubiquitous instance of FC (direct link) is supported by neural pathways (detour) physically wired by SC, which forms a cyclic loop interacted by brain structure and function. In the cliché of machine learning, the multi-hop detour pathway underlying SC-FC coupling allows us to devise a novel multi-head self-attention mechanism within Transformer to capture multi-modal feature representation from paired graphs of SC and FC. Taken together, we propose a biological-inspired deep model, coined as NeuroPath, to find putative connectomic feature representations from the unprecedented amount of neuroimages, which can be plugged into various downstream applications such as task recognition and disease diagnosis. We have evaluated NeuroPath on large-scale public datasets including HCP and UK Biobank under supervised and zero-shot learning, where the state-of-the-art performance by our NeuroPath indicates great potential in network neuroscience.
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