Organizations: College of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China · School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China
Brain networks characterize structural and functional relationships among brain regions and support research on cognition, brain disorders, and brain-computer interfaces. Their time-varying topology and higher-order spatiotemporal dependencies are not adequately represented by conventional static networks. Existing tools primarily focus on static connectomes and provide limited integration of dynamic network modeling with modern graph and sequence learning methods. We present BrainNet Studio, an integrated toolkit for static and dynamic brain network analysis. It provides a unified workflow encompassing network construction, feature extraction, predictive modeling, candidate biomarker identification, visualization, and assisted interpretation. The toolkit integrates 27 algorithms, including deep learning, graph neural networks, and spatiotemporal sequence models, to support classification and the identification of discriminative brain regions and connections. A large language model generates researcher-verifiable summaries of functional connectivity, structural connectivity, and structure-function coupling at individual and group levels. Within a consistent computational framework, users can configure analytical tasks, compare methods, inspect outputs, and extend functionality without repeatedly assembling application-specific pipelines. BrainNet Studio provides a practical and extensible platform for connectome analysis in cognitive neuroscience, exploratory studies of brain disorders, and brain-computer interfaces. The toolkit is publicly available at https://github.com/xbrainnet/Brainnet-Studio.
Figures & tables
Figure 3-1: Dynamic brain network input matrices for ST2GCN. Panels (a), (b), (c), and (d) show connectivity matrices covering all ROIs in four consecutive time windows from the same participant. Identical ROI ordering and display settings are used to illustrate changes in brain connectivity patterns over time.
Figure 3-2: ST2GCN-derived important brain connections. (a) Connectivity matrix of the global Top-20 connections. (b) Three-dimensional view with nodes at MNI coordinates; line width and opacity indicate relative connection importance. (c) Left lateral, axial, and right lateral projections of the same connections.
Figure 3-4: Global and regional evidence of between-group differences in brain networks. (a) Comparisons of global brain network metrics and corresponding effect sizes between the reference group (n = 73) and the target group (n = 70), including a measure of structure–function coupling complementarity. (b) ROIs showing significant between-group differences after Welch’s tests and Benjamini–Hochberg false discovery rate (BH-FDR) correction (Benjamini and Hochberg, 1995), together with changes in their metrics and associated functional networks.
Figure 4-1: Dynamic functional brain networks constructed using ST2GCN. Windows 1–4 show the functional connectivity matrices of the same participant across four consecutive, non-overlapping temporal windows. Rows and columns correspond to the 90 AAL brain regions. Colors represent absolute Pearson correlation coefficients retained at a threshold of 0.6; white cells indicate connections set to zero after thresholding. Diagonal self-connections are retained. All panels share the same ROI ordering and color scale.
Category
Method
ACC
AUC
F1
SEN
SPE
Static association and temporally aggregated topological methods
SVM
0.7162±0.1268
0.8571±0.1044
0.6625±0.1805
0.6143±0.2124
0.8107±0.1580
LDA
0.7857±0.0987
0.8495±0.0994
0.7552±0.1449
0.7286±0.1964
0.8393±0.1365
Logistic Regression
0.7924±0.1077
0.8582±0.0980
0.7755±0.1221
0.7571±0.1571
0.8232±0.1545
CCA–LDA
0.7924±0.1237
0.7902±0.1242
0.7791±0.1351
0.7714±0.1714
0.8089±0.1698
Random Forest
0.7581±0.1233
0.8616±0.1042
0.7112±0.1681
0.6429±0.1835
0.8661±0.1327
XGBoost
0.7581±0.1055
0.8464±0.1047
0.7035±0.1687
0.6429±0.2045
0.8643±0.1163
Table 4-1: Classification performance of 27 methods on the ADNI dataset (mean ± standard deviation).
Figure 4-2: Spatial distribution of ST2GCN-derived connection importance. Connections are shown in left lateral, axial, and right lateral views. Rainbow colors indicate relative importance. Black outlines highlight the Top-20 connections; other connections have light-gray outlines. Blue nodes represent AAL regional centroids.
Figure 4-3: Anatomical distribution of ST2GCN-derived regional importance. AAL parcels are shown in left lateral, axial, and right lateral projections. Rainbow colors indicate relative importance. Top-ranked regions have dark outlines and full-opacity colors; other regions appear paler. Where parcels overlap in projection, the highest-scoring parcel determines the displayed color.
Brain network analysis is crucial for understanding cognition and neurological disorders, yet existing deep learning methods mainly treat connectome analysis as a graph-to-logit classification problem, offering limited explanatory reasoning. Large language models (LLMs) provide a promising interface for knowledge-intensive scientific analysis, but directly applying general-purpose LLMs to brain networks remains challenging due to the structure-language gap, limited neuroscience grounding, and overconfident positive predictions. In this paper, we propose \textbf{BrainAgent}, an agentic LLM framework for knowledge-enhanced brain network analysis. BrainAgent reformulates connectome classification as an iterative process of topology-aware understanding, external retrieval, reasoning, and reflection. Specifically, it first converts raw brain networks into compact multi-level structural descriptions through brain-specific analysis tools, then retrieves relevant neuroscience knowledge and task-specific cases to ground the reasoning process, and finally generates structured predictions with reflective verification. Experiments on four public rs-fMRI datasets show that BrainAgent consistently improves different closed-source and open-source LLM backbones over direct prompting and standard reasoning baselines. Further ablation and interpretability analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of each component and show that BrainAgent produces more comprehensive, multi-level, and verifiable explanations.These results indicate that agentic LLMs provide a practical route toward interpretable and knowledge-grounded brain network analysis.
Jiaxing Li, Rui Dong, Muyao Tang +1
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University
We present Supervised Deep Multimodal Matrix Factorization (SD3MF), an interpretable framework for integrative brain network analysis that generalizes Symmetric Nonnegative Matrix Tri-Factorization (SNMTF) from unsupervised single-graph clustering to supervised prediction over populations of multimodal graphs. SD3MF learns deep hierarchical factorizations for each modality together with a shared latent representation that aligns subjects across views. An encoder-decoder formulation jointly optimizes graph reconstruction and supervised prediction, while adaptive weights enable data-driven multimodal fusion. By representing each subject through community-level interaction matrices, the model yields interpretable and discriminative features. Experiments on multimodal connectome datasets show that SD3MF consistently outperforms strong deep learning baselines such as CNNs and GNNs, while enabling biologically interpretable insights. Code for reproducibility is available at: https://github.com/amjadseyedi/SD3MF.
Amjad Seyedi, Lifang He, Songlin Zhao +2
Dept. of Mathematics & Operational Research University of Mons, Mons, Belgium · Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA · Dept. of Industrial & Systems Engineering Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA
Efficient neural network models that generate brain-like dynamic activity can be a valuable resource for generating synthetic data, analyzing differences in brain transients under conditions such as testing perturbation activity or inferring the underlying generative dynamics. However, large language models (LLMs) or standard recurrent neural networks (RNNs) ignore the anatomical organization and therefore do not produce components that align with brain regions. On the other hand, graph-based networks often have very simple message passing rules that are not sufficiently expressive for brain-like dynamics. To address this, we introduce BrainDyn, a sheaf neural ordinary differential equation (neural ODE) model for continuous-time dynamics on structured brain graphs. BrainDyn encodes the recent activity history of each brain region using a long short-term memory (LSTM) model over a sliding temporal window to produce hidden states, or stalks, that are projected through learnable restriction maps into edge-specific shared spaces. Discrepancies between neighboring nodes in these shared spaces are characterized by a sheaf Laplacian that can facilitate message passing between neuronal units. The output of these messages is then fed to a neural ODE that governs the continuous-time evolution of neuronal activity. We evaluated BrainDyn on resting-state fMRI (PNC dataset), scalp EEG with focal epilepsy (TUSZ dataset), and simulated activity from the NEST spiking network simulator. BrainDyn achieves strong forecasting ability across modalities, and the resulting representations support downstream tasks including in silico perturbation prediction.
Siddharth Viswanath, Panayiotis Ketonis, Chen Liu +3
1Yale University · 2Boise State University · University of Wisconsin–Madison