提出区域级因果干预框架,消除脑影像中年龄性别等干扰因素影响
Artemis: Anatomy-Resolved inTervention for Eliminating Multimodal NeuroImage confounderS

- 在每个脑区独立施加因果干预,学习区域特异性干扰因子表征
- 在三个临床数据集上显著提升疾病诊断与分类性能,最高提升8.2%
- 可兼容任意图神经网络,适合临床脑网络分析与可解释研究
多模态脑影像融合功能磁共振(fMRI)的功能连接与扩散张量成像(DTI)的结构连接,借助图神经网络实现脑网络的无创分析。然而,年龄、性别等人口学因素系统性混淆脑连接与临床结果的关系,导致图神经网络依赖虚假捷径而非学习因果不变表示。现有因果图神经网络方法虽引入因果性,但机制通用化,未考虑临床脑影像中的真实干扰因素。此外,脑网络基于图谱分割,各脑区对人口学因素敏感度不同,需区域感知调整。我们提出Artemis,一种区域级因果框架,通过轻量参数学习各脑区特异的干扰因子表征,在每个脑区独立施加因果干预。该调整模块利用多模态功能与结构特征进行图推理,可作为插件适配任意图神经网络主干。在三个基准测试中表现优异:ADNI疾病诊断、OASIS痴呆分期、HCP性别分类,均显著优于代表性基线模型。多组验证实验进一步证明结果统计显著且具备神经科学可解释性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Multimodal neuroimaging, integrating functional connectivity from fMRI and structural connectivity from DTI, enables non-invasive analysis of brain networks using graph neural networks. However, demographic factors such as age and sex systematically confound the relationship between brain connectivity and clinical outcomes, causing GNNs to exploit spurious shortcuts rather than learning causally invariant representations. While recent causal GNN methods introduce causality at the graph-modeling level, their causal mechanisms remain domain-agnostic without accounting for the real-world confounders inherent in clinical neuroimaging data. Moreover, brain networks are constructed from atlas-based parcellations where each region exhibits distinct sensitivity to demographic factors, necessitating region-aware adjustment. We propose Artemis, a region-level causal framework that bridges this gap with causal intervention at each brain region independently by learning region-specific confounder representations with lightweight parameters. Our adjustment comprehensively utilized the multimodal functional and structural features for graph reasoning as a plug-in module compatible with arbitrary GNN backbones. Experiments on three benchmarks, ADNI for disease diagnosis, OASIS for dementia staging, and HCP for sex classification, demonstrate consistent improvements over representative GNN-based baselines. Multiple supporting experiments further demonstrate statistical significance and neuroscientific interpretability.
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