FedBrain: Federated Training of Graph Neural Networks for Connectome-based Brain Imaging Analysis

Recent advancements in neuroimaging techniques have sparked a growing interest in understanding the complex interactions between anatomical regions of interest (ROIs), forming into brain networks that play a crucial role in various clinical tasks, such as neural pattern discovery and disorder diagnosis. In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for analyzing network data. However, due to the complexity of data acquisition and regulatory restrictions, brain network studies remain limited in scale and are often confined to local institutions. These limitations greatly challenge GNN models to capture useful neural circuitry patterns and deliver robust downstream performance. As a distributed machine learning paradigm, federated learning (FL) provides a promising solution in addressing resource limitation and privacy concerns, by enabling collaborative learning across local institutions (i.e., clients) without data sharing. While the data heterogeneity issues have been extensively studied in recent FL literature, cross-institutional brain network analysis presents unique data heterogeneity challenges, that is, the inconsistent ROI parcellation systems and varying predictive neural circuitry patterns across local neuroimaging studies. To this end, we propose FedBrain, a GNN-based personalized FL framework that takes into account the unique properties of brain network data. Specifically, we present a federated atlas mapping mechanism to overcome the feature and structure heterogeneity of brain networks arising from different ROI atlas systems, and a clustering approach guided by clinical prior knowledge to address varying predictive neural circuitry patterns regarding different patient groups, neuroimaging modalities and clinical outcomes. Compared to existing FL strategies, our approach demonstrates superior and more consistent performance, showcasing its strong potential and generalizability in cross-institutional connectome-based brain imaging analysis. The implementation is available here.