A novel graph neural network method for Alzheimer’s disease classification

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disease. Early diagnosis are very important to timely treatment and delay the progression of the disease. In the past decade, many computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) algorithms have been proposed for classification of AD. In this paper, we propose a novel graph neural network method, termed Brain Graph Attention Network (BGAN) for classification of AD. First, brain graph data are used to model classification of AD as a graph classification task. Second, a local attention layer is designed to capture and aggregate messages of interactions between node neighbors. And, a global attention layer is introduced to obtain the contribution of each node for graph representation. Finally, using the BGAN to implement AD classification. We train and test on two open public databases for AD classification task. Compared to classic models, the experimental results show that our model is superior to six classic models. We demonstrate that BGAN is a powerful classification model for AD. In addition, our model can provide an analysis of brain regions in order to judge which regions are related to AD disease and which regions are related to AD progression.