# RTGMFF: Enhanced fMRI-based Brain Disorder Diagnosis via ROI-driven Text Generation and Multimodal Feature Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03214 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03214/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [Brain Network Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06681/) (2022)
- [BrainGB: A Benchmark for Brain Network Analysis with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07054/) (2022)
- [Community-Aware Transformer for Autism Prediction in fMRI Connectome](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10181/) (2023)
- [Source-Free Collaborative Domain Adaptation via Multi-Perspective Feature Enrichment for Functional MRI Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12495/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Brain-HGCN: A Hyperbolic Graph Convolutional Network for Brain Functional Network Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14965/) (2025)
- [Effective Attention-Guided Multi-Scale Medical Network for Skin Lesion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07275/) (2025)
- [fMRI-TAMCL: Text-Anchored Supervised Multimodal Contrastive Learning for fMRI-Based Brain Disorder Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05880/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a powerful tool for probing brain function, yet reliable clinical diagnosis is hampered by low signal-to-noise ratios, inter-subject variability, and the limited frequency awareness of prevailing CNN- and Transformer-based models. Moreover, most fMRI datasets lack textual annotations that could contextualize regional activation and connectivity patterns. We introduce RTGMFF, a framework that unifies automatic ROI-level text generation with multimodal feature fusion for brain-disorder diagnosis. RTGMFF consists of three components: (i) ROI-driven fMRI text generation deterministically condenses each subject's activation, connectivity, age, and sex into reproducible text tokens; (ii) Hybrid frequency-spatial encoder fuses a hierarchical wavelet-mamba branch with a cross-scale Transformer encoder to capture frequency-domain structure alongside long-range spatial dependencies; and (iii) Adaptive semantic alignment module embeds the ROI token sequence and visual features in a shared space, using a regularized cosine-similarity loss to narrow the modality gap. Extensive experiments on the ADHD-200 and ABIDE benchmarks show that RTGMFF surpasses current methods in diagnostic accuracy, achieving notable gains in sensitivity, specificity, and area under the ROC curve. Code is available at https://github.com/BeistMedAI/RTGMFF.