Edge-boosted graph learning for functional brain connectivity analysis

Predicting disease states from functional brain connectivity is critical for the early diagnosis of severe neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's Disease. Existing studies commonly employ Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to infer clinical diagnoses from node-based brain connectivity matrices generated through node-to-node similarities of regionally averaged fMRI signals. However, recent neuroscience studies found that such node-based connectivity does not accurately capture ``functional connections" within the brain. This paper proposes a novel approach to brain network analysis that emphasizes edge functional connectivity (eFC), shifting the focus to inter-edge relationships. Additionally, we introduce a co-embedding technique to integrate edge functional connections effectively. Experimental results on the ADNI and PPMI datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art GNN methods in classifying functional brain networks.