Weidao Chen | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

Neurocircuitry-Inspired Hierarchical Graph Causal Attention Networks for Explainable Depression Identification

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), affecting millions worldwide, exhibits complex pathophysiology manifested through disrupted brain network dynamics. Although graph neural networks that leverage neuroimaging data have shown promise in depression diagnosis, existing approaches are predominantly data-driven and operate largely as black-box models, lacking neurobiological interpretability. Here, we present NH-GCAT (Neurocircuitry-Inspired Hierarchical Graph Causal Attention Networks), a novel framework that bridges neuroscience domain knowledge with deep learning by explicitly and hierarchically modeling depression-specific mechanisms at different spatial scales. Our approach introduces three key technical contributions: (1) at the local brain regional level, we design a residual gated fusion module that integrates temporal blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) dynamics with functional connectivity patterns, specifically engineered to capture local depression-relevant low-frequency neural oscillations; (2) at the multi-regional circuit level, we propose a hierarchical circuit encoding scheme that aggregates regional node representations following established depression neurocircuitry organization, and (3) at the multi-circuit network level, we develop a variational latent causal attention mechanism that leverages a continuous probabilistic latent space to infer directed information flow among critical circuits, characterizing disease-altered whole-brain inter-circuit interactions. Rigorous leave-one-site-out cross-validation on the REST-meta-MDD dataset demonstrates NH-GCAT's state-of-the-art performance in depression classification, achieving a sample-size weighted-average accuracy of 73.3\% and an AUROC of 76.4\%, while simultaneously providing neurobiologically meaningful explanations.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Federated Learning for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Classification with Partial Personalized Attention Mechanism

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is the fourth leading cause of death worldwide. Yet, COPD diagnosis heavily relies on spirometric examination as well as functional airway limitation, which may cause a considerable portion of COPD patients underdiagnosed especially at the early stage. Recent advance in deep learning (DL) has shown their promising potential in COPD identification from CT images. However, with heterogeneous syndromes and distinct phenotypes, DL models trained with CTs from one data center fail to generalize on images from another center. Due to privacy regularizations, a collaboration of distributed CT images into one centralized center is not feasible. Federated learning (FL) approaches enable us to train with distributed private data. Yet, routine FL solutions suffer from performance degradation in the case where COPD CTs are not independent and identically distributed (Non-IID). To address this issue, we propose a novel personalized federated learning (PFL) method based on vision transformer (ViT) for distributed and heterogeneous COPD CTs. To be more specific, we partially personalize some heads in multiheaded self-attention layers to learn the personalized attention for local data and retain the other heads shared to extract the common attention. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first proposal of a PFL framework specifically for ViT to identify COPD. Our evaluation of a dataset set curated from six medical centers shows our method outperforms the PFL approaches for convolutional neural networks.

cs.CV↗