DAGMNet: Dual-Branch Attention-Pruned Graph Neural Network for Multimodal sMRI and fMRI Fusion in Autism Prediction.

Background

Accurate and early diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is essential for timely intervention. Structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provide complementary insights into brain structure and function. Most deep learning approaches rely on a single modality, limiting their ability to capture cross-modal relationships.

Methods

We propose DAGMNet, a dual-branch attention-pruned graph neural network for ASD prediction that integrates sMRI, fMRI, and phenotypic data. The framework employs modality-specific feature extraction to preserve unique structural and functional characteristics, an attention-based cross-modal fusion module to model inter-modality complementarity, and a phenotype-pruned dynamic graph learning module with adaptive graph construction for personalized diagnosis.

Results

Evaluated on the ABIDE-I dataset, DAGMNet achieves an accuracy of 91.59% and an AUC of 96.80%, outperforming several state-of-the-art baselines. To validate the method's generalizability, we also validate it on ADNI datasets from other degenerative diseases and achieve good results.

Conclusions

By effectively fusing multimodal neuroimaging and phenotypic information, DAGMNet enhances cross-modal representation learning and improves diagnostic accuracy. To further assist clinical decision making, we conduct biomarker detection analysis to provide region-level explanations of our model's decisions.