NeuroTree: Hierarchical Functional Brain Pathway Decoding for Mental Health Disorders

Mental disorders are among the most widespread diseases globally. Analyzing functional brain networks through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is crucial for understanding mental disorder behaviors. Although existing fMRI-based graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated significant potential in brain network feature extraction, they often fail to characterize complex relationships between brain regions and demographic information in mental disorders. To overcome these limitations, we propose a learnable NeuroTree framework that integrates a k-hop AGE-GCN with neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and contrastive masked functional connectivity (CMFC) to enhance similarities and dissimilarities of brain region distance. Furthermore, NeuroTree effectively decodes fMRI network features into tree structures, which improves the capture of high-order brain regional pathway features and enables the identification of hierarchical neural behavioral patterns essential for understanding disease-related brain subnetworks. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that NeuroTree achieves state-of-the-art performance across two distinct mental disorder datasets. It provides valuable insights into age-related deterioration patterns, elucidating their underlying neural mechanisms.