Hierarchical neighbor integration graph attention network for autism spectrum disorder diagnosis

Early diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) based on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is crucial for effective intervention and rehabilitation. Using rs-fMRI, functional brain networks (FBNs) are constructed to represent interactions among brain regions of interest (ROIs), and existing graph neural network-based methods, particularly Graph Attention Networks (GATs), have shown promise for FBN-based ASD diagnosis. However, most current approaches primarily aggregate ROIs through low-order pairwise interactions, while higher-order neighbors are incorporated only implicitly through increased network depth. This strategy often leads to over-smoothing of node representations and limits the capture of informative higher-order brain interactions.

To address these challenges, we propose the Hierarchical Neighbor Integration Graph Attention Network (HiNIGAT), a general graph learning framework that explicitly models multi-order interactions in FBNs. Specifically, HiNIGAT introduces a multi-order attention mechanism that constrains each attention head to specialize in a distinct neighborhood order, enabling the model to capture brain interactions from local connectivity to global network structure. Furthermore, a bidirectional gated fusion strategy is proposed to adaptively integrate complementary information across multi-order features, facilitating effective local-global representation collaboration.

Experiments on the ABIDE-I dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of HiNIGAT.

The results highlight the importance of explicit multi-order integration for ASD diagnosis.