LUMINA: Laplacian-Unifying Mechanism for Interpretable Neurodevelopmental Analysis via Quad-Stream GCN

Abstract

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging(fMRI) has now become a classic way for measuring brain activity, and recent trend is shifting toward utilizing fMRI brain data for AI-driven diagnosis. Given that the brain functions as not a discrete but interconnected whole, Graph-based architectures represented by Graph Convolutional Network(GCN) has emerged as a dominant framework for such task, since they are capable of treating ROIs as dynamically interconnected nodes and extracting relational architecture between them. Ironically, however, it is the very nature of GCN's architecture that acts as an obstacle to its performance. The mathematical foundation of GCN, effective for capturing global regularities, acts as a tradeoff; by smoothing features across the connected nodes repeatedly, traditional GCN tend to blur out the contrastive dynamics that might be crucial in identifying certain neurological disorders. In order to break through this structural bottleneck, we propose LUMINA, a Laplacian-Unifying Mechanism for Interpretable Neurodevelopmental Analysis. Our model is a Quad-Stream GCN that employs a bipolar RELU activation and a dual-spectrum graph Laplacian filtering mechanism, thereby capturing heterogeneous dynamics that were often blurred out in conventional GCN. By doing so, we can preserve the diverse range and characteristics of neural connections in each fMRI data. Through 5-fold cross validation on the ADHD200(N=144) and ABIDE(N=579) dataset, LUMINA demonstrates stable diagnostic performance in two of the most critical neurodevelopmental disorder in childhood, ADHD and ASD, outperforming existing models with an accuracy of 84.66% and 88.41% each.