StairwayGraphNet for Inter- and Intra-modality Multi-resolution Brain Graph Alignment and Synthesis

Abstract

Synthesizing multimodality medical data provides complementary knowledge and helps doctors make precise clinical decisions. Although promising, existing multimodal brain graph synthesis frameworks have several limitations. First, they mainly tackle only one problem (intra- or inter-modality), limiting their generalizability to synthesizing inter- and intra-modality simultaneously. Second, while few techniques work on super-resolving low-resolution brain graphs within a single modality (i.e., intra), inter-modality graph super-resolution remains unexplored though this would avoid the need for costly data collection and processing. More importantly, both target and source domains might have different distributions, which causes a domain fracture between them. To fill these gaps, we propose a multi-resolution StairwayGraphNet (SG-Net) framework to jointly infer a target graph modality based on a given modality and super-resolve brain graphs in both inter and intra domains. Our SG-Net is grounded in three main contributions: (i) predicting a target graph from a source one based on a novel graph generative adversarial network in both inter (e.g., morphological-functional) and intra (e.g., functional-functional) domains, (ii) generating high-resolution brain graphs without resorting to the time consuming and expensive MRI processing steps, and (iii) enforcing the source distribution to match that of the ground truth graphs using an inter-modality aligner to relax the loss function to optimize. Moreover, we design a new Ground Truth-Preserving loss function to guide both generators in learning the topological structure of ground truth brain graphs more accurately. Our comprehensive experiments on predicting target brain graphs from source graphs using a multi-resolution stairway showed the outperformance of our method in comparison with its variants and state-of-the-art method.