A Causal Adversarial Graph Neural Network for Multi-Center Autism Spectrum Disorder Identification

Abstract

Due to the heterogeneous distributions of multi-center rs-fMRI data, currently it is still challenging to identify accurately autism spectrum disorder (ASD) patients from these heterogenous data. To deal with the influence of heterogeneous distributions on multi-center ASD diagnosis, a novel causal adversarial graph neural network (CAG) for multi-center ASD prediction is proposed in this work. CAG mainly consists of a graph filtering (GF) module and a learnable causal graph predictor (CGP). Specifically, the brain connection graph is first constructed from rs-fMRI data, after passing a GF module, the filtered graph is further divided by a causal subgraph and causally irrelevant subgraph. The ground-truth environmental labels and ASD labels are predicted from causal subgraph by a clustering method and a classification block, respectively. In addition, from the filtered graph and causally irrelevant subgraph, the environmental labels are predicted, while from the causally irrelevant subgraph the ASD labels are predicted. Assuming that the predicted environmental labels are independent to causal subgraph, while the predicted ASD labels are independent to causally irrelevant subgraph, accordingly, several adversarial losses are implemented by reversing the gradient. Through this adversarial learning strategy, the derived causal graph can predict multi-center ASD. The comparison experiments on both ABIDE-I and ABIDE-II datasets demonstrate that, the ACC and AUC of CAG has been improved by 3.78\% and 7.38\% at least comparing against the existing methods. Moreover, some abnormal functional connectivities in ASD group are identified from the causal subgraph which may provide useful imaging biomarkers for the early diagnosis of ASD.

Keywords: autism spectrum disorder, Graph Neural Network, fMRI analysis, causal adversarial, multi-center data