Organizations: College of Biomedical Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China · College of Information Science and Technology & Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing 210037, China · Department of Psychosomatics and Psychiatry, Zhongda Hospital, School of Medicine, Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of Brain Science and Medicine, Southeast University, Nanjing 210009, China · College of Clinical Medicine, Jiangsu Health Vocational College, Nanjing 210018, China · Taian Tumor Hospital, Taian 271000, China · Department of Radiology and Biomedical Research Imaging Center (BRIC), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA
Resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) is a vital non-invasive tool for diagnosing brain disorders and uncovering pathological mechanisms. However, existing graph contrastive learning (GCL) methods often underexploit augmentation histories across training epochs and the relationships among different augmented views. In this paper, we introduce a topology-guided Multi-view graph Contrastive learning framework with Dynamic graph topology Augmentation (MCDA) for fMRI analysis. Unlike traditional GCL that uses fixed noise or edge-dropping, MCDA employs a Dynamic Augmentation Update (DAU) module that iteratively refines the augmented topology. Specifically, we incorporate self-aware and cross-sample augmentation strategies to simultaneously capture individual-specific functional signatures and inter-subject heterogeneity. We then design a topology-guided multi-view graph contrastive learning scheme that explores interrelationships not only between the original network and its augmented views, but also across different augmented views to maximize structural information preservation. We characterize the score-level optimization directions and establish a lower bound for the contrastive objective. The framework combines classification and contrastive losses for brain disorder diagnosis and examines discriminative functional connectivity patterns as potential biomarkers. Experiments on two public rs-fMRI datasets comprising 1,236 subjects demonstrate that MCDA outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The code has been made publicly available at: https://github.com/goodcodingagoodboy/MCDA.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Overview of the proposed MCDA framework for rs-fMRI analysis. (a) The framework comprises brain network construction, dynamic graph augmentation, and topology-guided multi-view graph contrastive learning. (b) Self-aware augmentation provides subject-specific modulation, while cross-sample augmentation introduces spatial and temporal perturbations from other subjects. (c) The DAU module uses a shared BiGRU to summarize cross-epoch augmentation histories and sigmoid-gated fusion to refine current augmented views using branch-specific historical references.
Fig. 2: The spatio-temporal GC Encoder consists of spatial and temporal graph convolution parts. Here, TP refers to time points, and ROI represents brain region nodes.
Fig. 3: Illustration of the DAU module. (a) Whole-graph projection and construction of a descriptor history window across training epochs. (b) Shared BiGRU encoding followed by decoding and sigmoid gate generation. (c) Gated fusion of the current augmentation with the preceding epoch’s pre-refinement graph. The self-aware and cross-sample branches share BiGRU parameters while maintaining separate histories, projections, and decoders.
Dataset
Site
Category
Number
Gender(M/F)
Age
REST-MDD
20
MDD
282
99/183
38.74 ± 13.74
HC
251
87/164
39.64 ± 15.87
21
MDD
86
38/48
34.71 ± 12.63
HC
70
31/39
36.13 ± 12.64
25
MDD
89
21/68
65.60 ± 6.75
HC
63
29/34
69.63 ± 5.86
TABLE I: Demographic Information of studied subjects from the REST-MDD and ABIDE datasets. The age is reported as mean ± standard deviation. M: Male; F: Female; MDD: Major depressive disorder; ASD: Autism Spectrum Disorder; HC: Healthy control.
Method
Site 20
Site 21
Site 25
ACC
AUC
PRE
REC
ACC
AUC
PRE
REC
ACC
AUC
PRE
REC
BrainGNN
63.6 ± 1.7 *
65.5 ± 3.3
57.6 ± 5.9
69.8 ± 14.2
65.2 ± 6.2
67.0 ± 2.9
58.8 ± 7.2
74.2 ± 7.5
66.2 ± 8.3
64.8 ± 7.6
59.3 ± 7.2
68.0 ± 8.2
LCAF
61.6 ± 1.9 *
62.8 ± 4.0
54.3 ± 2.7
68.9 ± 7.3
61.1 ± 2.9 *
55.5 ± 6.6
55.3 ± 10.1
57.3 ± 12.7
69.0 ± 7.3
67.6 ± 3.6
63.0 ± 6.8
70.0 ± 6.1
TSDA
62.1 ± 2.4 *
60.9 ± 4.6
56.1 ± 3.9
62.9 ± 7.8
59.0 ± 2.7 *
55.0 ± 5.8
52.6 ± 7.9
62.9 ± 17.0
62.7 ± 5.7 *
54.2 ± 4.1
52.1 ± 1.1
63.8 ± 13.9
GCDA
63.5 ± 1.0 *
62.2 ± 4.0
59.4 ± 4.2
64.5 ± 14.3
67.3 ± 4.1
65.2 ± 6.5
60.0 ± 10.5
69.4 ± 7.8
69.3 ± 3.3
68.8 ± 6.3
70.7 ± 7.6
72.6 ± 9.6
UCGL
63.7 ± 2.7 *
60.7 ± 2.7
57.9 ± 2.9
66.2 ± 11.1
62.8 ± 3.3 *
61.2 ± 5.7
52.0 ± 8.3
63.4 ± 13.1
63.3 ± 1.9 *
58.0 ± 4.4
57.1 ± 9.8
67.2 ± 12.3
TABLE II: Results (%) of seven methods in MDD vs. HC classification with mean ± standard deviation. Best results are shown in bold. Here, * denotes a statistically significant ( p <0.05) difference between MCDA and a competing method in terms of accuracy.
Method
Site NYU
Site UM
Site USM
ACC
AUC
PRE
REC
ACC
AUC
PRE
REC
ACC
AUC
PRE
REC
BrainGNN
73.6 ± 7.8 *
70.3 ± 5.9
70.3 ± 5.8
49.9 ± 7.5
70.9 ± 6.1
70.4 ± 5.6
81.0 ± 14.9
51.3 ± 14.2
75.2 ± 9.1 *
71.1 ± 10.2
69.2 ± 13.9
84.7 ± 11.5
LCAF
71.7 ± 4.6 *
72.2 ± 4.8
77.6 ± 9.2
64.9 ± 12.4
71.2 ± 5.2
73.0 ± 5.7
72.2 ± 13.4
61.8 ± 8.9
71.5 ± 5.1 *
73.9 ± 11.2
70.6 ± 15.9
73.5 ± 12.4
TSDA
68.3 ± 7.0 *
69.3 ± 7.3
73.1 ± 9.8
66.6 ± 8.5
69.5 ± 4.2 *
70.8 ± 9.9
72.5 ± 17.7
68.8 ± 15.9
62.4 ± 4.5 *
57.4 ± 5.4
66.1 ± 6.4
69.2 ± 2.2
GCDA
76.4 ± 2.4
65.7 ± 6.0
76.2 ± 8.3
66.7 ± 15.6
71.2 ± 13.4
74.5 ± 14.8
65.3 ± 12.1
77.9 ± 16.2
77.8 ± 8.6
73.9 ± 14.1
81.7 ± 6.9
78.6 ± 15.1
UCGL
73.0 ± 6.6 *
70.7 ± 8.2
78.9 ± 8.2
59.6 ± 17.5
74.5 ± 5.2
71.8 ± 7.7
81.1 ± 6.5
58.2 ± 18.7
77.2 ± 7.5
78.6 ± 9.0
78.0 ± 9.4
78.1 ± 9.4
TABLE III: Results (%) of seven methods in ASD vs. HC classification with mean ± standard deviation. Best results are shown in bold. Here, * denotes a statistically significant ( p <0.05) difference between MCDA and a competing method in terms of accuracy.
Method
Site 20
Site 21
Site 25
ACC
AUC
PRE
REC
ACC
AUC
PRE
REC
ACC
AUC
PRE
REC
MCDA-I
61.5 ± 2.6 *
50.9 ± 3.2
53.8 ± 2.7
63.8 ± 8.4
63.2 ± 5.4 *
65.4 ± 2.5
54.0 ± 8.5
66.6 ± 12.3
63.3 ± 1.9 *
58.8 ± 4.6
52.7 ± 5.8
63.8 ± 11.8
MCDA-II
60.8 ± 3.6 *
63.5 ± 7.3
58.9 ± 4.5
53.8 ± 10.7
68.0 ± 4.9 *
69.3 ± 6.5
52.4 ± 11.6
60.9 ± 19.0
68.0 ± 8.1
64.1 ± 10.7
59.5 ± 18.5
54.1 ± 7.8
MCDA-III
58.2 ± 5.6 *
55.6 ± 6.5
54.3 ± 4.9
49.3 ± 8.9
65.4 ± 4.9 *
53.7 ± 12.5
57.5 ± 10.4
58.7 ± 13.1
64.4 ± 4.6 *
67.5 ± 5.4
68.5 ± 2.6
66.3 ± 3.2
MCDA
70.3 ± 2.9
74.5 ± 2.8
72.3 ± 4.0
65.6 ± 8.4
71.8 ± 6.4
70.2 ± 5.3
63.9 ± 4.8
69.5 ± 8.8
73.4 ± 3.4
73.8 ± 2.5
66.6 ± 6.5
79.4 ± 9.8
TABLE IV: Results (%) of MCDA and its three variants in MDD vs. HC classification. Best results are shown in bold. Here, * denotes a statistically significant ( p <0.05) difference between MCDA and a variant in terms of accuracy.
Method
Site NYU
Site UM
Site USM
ACC
AUC
PRE
REC
ACC
AUC
PRE
REC
ACC
AUC
PRE
REC
MCDA-I
76.0 ± 7.1
77.5 ± 8.3
70.2 ± 11.9
58.0 ± 10.4
70.9 ± 7.6
73.0 ± 8.3
78.0 ± 18.0
59.4 ± 26.2
74.5 ± 2.6
76.1 ± 4.1
76.0 ± 6.9
74.7 ± 6.8
MCDA-II
73.6 ± 6.8 *
76.0 ± 7.4
81.7 ± 7.6
57.6 ± 14.2
72.7 ± 4.5
75.7 ± 7.2
81.9 ± 6.4
61.3 ± 16.3
70.2 ± 5.3 *
70.6 ± 7.9
64.9 ± 9.9
78.4 ± 9.1
MCDA-III
69.0 ± 9.0 *
68.0 ± 6.5
77.0 ± 16.3
61.5 ± 14.9
65.4 ± 3.3 *
65.4 ± 1.7
65.7 ± 7.3
69.8 ± 2.1
67.4 ± 5.2 *
66.4 ± 8.0
66.2 ± 6.3
75.3 ± 10.6
MCDA
81.1 ± 2.1
82.9 ± 2.4
76.1 ± 9.9
68.1 ± 8.0
75.0 ± 2.6
78.4 ± 7.2
87.4 ± 3.6
61.2 ± 9.6
80.2 ± 7.1
82.1 ± 5.8
77.9 ± 8.9
86.2 ± 8.4
TABLE V: Results (%) of MCDA and its three variants in ASD vs. HC classification. Best results are shown in bold. Here, * denotes a statistically significant ( p <0.05) difference between MCDA and a variant in terms of accuracy.
Fig. 4: Visualization of the top 10 ROI-pair associations identified by MCDA in two classification tasks: (a) MDD vs. HC classification (Site 20) on REST-MDD, and (b) ASD vs. HC classification (Site NYU) on ABIDE.
Fig. 5: Visualization of dynamic augmented brain networks by DAU module at every 20 epochs in (a) self-aware and (b) cross-sample augmentation.
Fig. 6: Results of MCDA-GRU, MCDA-LSTM and MCDA on Site 20 from the REST-MDD dataset.
Method
ACC
AUC
PRE
REC
MCDA-None
59.8 ± 4.3
60.0 ± 6.8
52.8 ± 8.3
53.7 ± 7.3
MCDA-Ra-GConv
64.2 ± 3.7
66.2 ± 4.2
57.1 ± 6.2
67.9 ± 5.9
MCDA-2DCNN
62.6 ± 3.0
65.0 ± 4.6
58.3 ± 4.4
66.0 ± 3.9
MCDA
70.3 ± 2.9
74.5 ± 2.8
72.3 ± 4.0
65.6 ± 8.4
TABLE VI: Results (%) of different augmentation encoders on Site 20 from the REST-MDD dataset.
Fig. 7: Accuracy and AUC of MCDA with different Topology-guided Multi-view Contrastive Loss parameters α and β on Site 20 from the REST-MDD dataset.
Fig. 8: Results of MCDA with different loss parameter λ on Site 20 from the REST-MDD dataset.
K
ACC
AUC
PRE
REC
1
60.2 ± 3.1
56.4 ± 3.7
56.0 ± 5.7
65.5 ± 2.4
3
64.4 ± 0.8
59.2 ± 3.5
61.0 ± 3.5
61.4 ± 6.7
5
70.3 ± 2.9
74.5 ± 2.8
72.3 ± 4.0
65.6 ± 8.4
7
67.0 ± 2.9
66.6 ± 9.6
67.7 ± 6.9
62.1 ± 6.5
9
69.0 ± 3.5
68.0 ± 8.5
66.9 ± 6.5
65.8 ± 5.1
TABLE VII: Results (%) of MCDA with different history window lengths K on Site 20 from the REST-MDD dataset.
Batch Size
ACC
AUC
PRE
REC
30
59.1 ± 6.1
56.2 ± 4.6
53.2 ± 15.4
44.5 ± 14.7
35
61.6 ± 6.4
60.4 ± 5.3
57.3 ± 4.8
54.3 ± 8.8
40
58.9 ± 6.2
61.4 ± 10.1
55.3 ± 9.3
50.4 ± 7.8
45
70.3 ± 2.9
74.5 ± 2.8
72.3 ± 4.0
65.6 ± 8.4
50
64.2 ± 4.0
67.1 ± 7.5
52.7 ± 7.5
65.1 ± 8.2
TABLE VIII: Results (%) of MCDA with different batch sizes on Site 20 from the REST-MDD dataset.
Graph contrastive learning trains graph representations by aligning related nodes or graph views while separating structurally or semantically different examples.
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a common neuropsychiatric condition whose accurate diagnosis from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) remains difficult. Dynamic functional connectivity (DFC) captures time-varying interactions among brain regions and provides rich spatio-temporal information, yet current DFC-based methods face three limitations: sliding-window Pearson correlation yields noisy estimates sensitive to window length and motion artifacts; correlation-derived node features do not fully exploit frequency-domain properties of blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals; and most spatio-temporal graph models handle spatial structure and temporal dynamics in separate stages, restricting their ability to represent coupled brain network evolution. To overcome these issues, we reformulate DFC learning as joint spatio-temporal graph representation learning under a Hawkes-process-inspired temporal dependency prior and propose HWSTCL, a two-stage framework built on a reliability-refined joint spatio-temporal graph with a kernel-weighted pretraining objective. Within each temporal window, BOLD signals are encoded as spectral node descriptors and functional edges are refined by an exponential distance-decay prior that down-weights less reliable long-range connections. The joint graph is then formed by linking each region to itself across future windows through a Hawkes-inspired exponential kernel, allowing spatial and temporal information to be propagated together during message passing. A kernel-weighted contrastive objective further promotes temporal consistency for each region across windows while reducing redundant similarity between different regions. Experiments on a benchmark rs-fMRI dataset show that HWSTCL outperforms recent baselines and yields coherent spatio-temporal representations for MDD diagnosis.
Muhammad Asif Hasan, Yanming Zhu, Xuefei Yin +1
School of Information Technology and Communication, Griffith University, Australia
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is widely used for studying and diagnosing brain disorders, with functional connectivity (FC) matrices providing powerful representations of large-scale neural interactions. However, existing diagnostic models are trained either on a single site or under full multi-site access, making them unsuitable for real-world scenarios where clinical data arrive sequentially from different institutions. This results in limited generalization and severe catastrophic forgetting. This paper presents the first continual learning framework specifically designed for fMRI-based diagnosis across heterogeneous clinical sites. Our framework introduces a structure-aware variational autoencoder that synthesizes realistic FC matrices for both patient and control groups. Built on this generative backbone, we develop a multi-level knowledge distillation strategy that aligns predictions and graph representations between new-site data and replayed samples. To further enhance efficiency, we incorporate a hierarchical contextual bandit scheme for adaptive replay sampling. Experiments on multi-site datasets for major depressive disorder (MDD), schizophrenia (SZ), and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show that the proposed generative model enhances data augmentation quality, and the overall continual learning framework substantially outperforms existing methods in mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Our code is available at https://github.com/4me808/FORGE.
Qianyu Chen, Shujian Yu
†Nanyang Technological University · ‡VU Amsterdam · §UiT The Arctic University of Norway
Cross-site identification of major depressive disorder (MDD) from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is hindered by inter-site distribution shifts and heterogeneous functional connectivity (FC) views. These views capture complementary neural relationships but exhibit distinct site biases and graph topologies, complicating alignment without sacrificing disease-relevant information or cross-view consistency. Existing studies largely treat multi-view connectome learning and cross-site adaptation separately. To the best of our knowledge, few studies have jointly modeled multiple FC views under multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation for cross-site rs-fMRI-based MDD classification. We construct Pearson correlation, sparse representation, and Granger causality graphs, each encoded by a view-specific graph attention network. Dual-stream adaptive fusion explicitly integrates pairwise cross-view interactions, followed by lightweight hyperbolic residual encoding for curvature-aware representation refinement. Class-wise Cauchy--Schwarz alignment reduces inter-source and source-target discrepancies, complemented by adversarial learning, information maximization, and confidence-aware pseudo-labeling. Across seven unlabeled target domains, our framework achieves 73.60% mean accuracy and 71.90% AUC, demonstrating effective generalization under heterogeneous acquisition conditions. These results highlight the effectiveness of unified heterogeneous-view modeling, curvature-aware refinement, and multi-source domain adaptation for cross-site MDD identification.The source code is at https://github.com/OPUS-Lightphenexx/MM-HyperGDA
Zhanpeng Zheng, Xiran Chen, Haiteng Jiang +6
School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Shandong Jianzhu University, Shandong, China. · School of Mathematics and Statistics, Chongqing Jiaotong University, Chongqing, China. · Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, China. +4