Papers › NeuroPath: A Neural Pathway Transformer for Joining the Dots of Human Connectomes

NeuroPath: A Neural Pathway Transformer for Joining the Dots of Human Connectomes

26 Sep 2024arXiv:2409.17510archive 2025-07-28

Ziquan Wei, Tingting Dan, Jiaqi Ding, Guorong Wu

Although modern imaging technologies allow us to study connectivity between two distinct brain regions in-vivo, an in-depth understanding of how anatomical structure supports brain function and how spontaneous functional fluctuations emerge remarkable cognition is still elusive. Meanwhile, tremendous efforts have been made in the realm of machine learning to establish the nonlinear mapping between neuroimaging data and phenotypic traits. However, the absence of neuroscience insight in the current approaches poses significant challenges in understanding cognitive behavior from transient neural activities. To address this challenge, we put the spotlight on the coupling mechanism of structural connectivity (SC) and functional connectivity (FC) by formulating such network neuroscience question into an expressive graph representation learning problem for high-order topology. Specifically, we introduce the concept of topological detour to characterize how a ubiquitous instance of FC (direct link) is supported by neural pathways (detour) physically wired by SC, which forms a cyclic loop interacted by brain structure and function. In the clich\'e of machine learning, the multi-hop detour pathway underlying SC-FC coupling allows us to devise a novel multi-head self-attention mechanism within Transformer to capture multi-modal feature representation from paired graphs of SC and FC. Taken together, we propose a biological-inspired deep model, coined as NeuroPath, to find putative connectomic feature representations from the unprecedented amount of neuroimages, which can be plugged into various downstream applications such as task recognition and disease diagnosis. We have evaluated NeuroPath on large-scale public datasets including HCP and UK Biobank under supervised and zero-shot learning, where the state-of-the-art performance by our NeuroPath indicates great potential in network neuroscience.

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DetourTransformer Chrisa142857/neuro_detour/models/neuro_detour.py official repository ran no licence file found · pointer only · c93be3bf01cdf7c7 · report
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Tasks

2-task ClassificationGraph ClassificationGraph Representation LearningRepresentation LearningZero-Shot Learning

3 archive task tags without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Graph Classification ADNI NeuroPath Accuracy 85.56 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Classification HCP Aging NeuroPath Accuracy 98.23 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Classification OASIS NeuroPath Accuracy 90.01 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Classification UK Biobank Brain MRI NeuroPath Accuracy 99.59 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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