Identification of Mild Hepatic Encephalopathy Based on Multi-level Functional Connectivity Hypernetwork

Early diagnosis of mild hepatic encephalopathy is important for the reversion of hepatic encephalopathy. Brain hyper-connectivity networks with hyperedges have showed good performance for diagnosis of neurological disorders. However, the previous hyper-connectivity networks is essentially low-level since the temporal synchronization of regional signal fluctuation is merely considered. Here, we propose a novel high-level hyper-connectivity network based on the resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging to capture the complex interactions among brain regions for better diagnosis of neurological disorders. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from 36 mild hepatic encephalopathy patients and 36 cirrhotic patients with no mild hepatic encephalopathy are included in the study. Multi-level high-level hyper-connectivity networks are constructed firstly. Then, we define and extract node hyperdegree, hyperedge global importance and hyperedge dispersion from both low-level and high-level hyper-connectivity networks and combine them. Finally, gradient boosting decision tree is used for feature selection and classification. The leave-one-out cross-validation is used to evaluate the performance. The public ASD resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging datasets from 3 sites are also used as testing set to evaluate the generalization power of our method. Our method showed considerable performance in both experiments which confirms the effectiveness and generalization ability of the model. Besides, important regions and hyperedge features are identified for the interpretability.