mTBI-DSANet: A deep self-attention model for diagnosing mild traumatic brain injury using multi-level functional connectivity networks

The main approach for analyzing resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is the low -order functional connectivity network (LoFCN) based on the correlation between two brain regions. Based on LoFCN, researchers recently proposed the topographical high-order FCN (tHoFCN) and the associated high-order FCN (aHoFCN) to explore the high-order interactions among brain regions. In this work, we designed a Deep Self-Attention (DSA) framework called mTBI-DSANet to diagnose mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) using multi-level FCNs, including LoFCN, tHoFCN, and aHoFCN. The multilayer perceptron and self-attention mechanism in mTBI-DSANet were designed to capture important features for the mTBI diagnosis. We evaluated the mTBI-DSANet's performance on the real rs-fMRI dataset, which was collected by Third Xiangya Hospital of Central South University from April 2014 to February 2021. We compared the performance of mTBI-DSANet with distinct FCNs and their combinations under 10-fold cross-validation. Based on the LoFCN+aHoFCN combination, the average performance of mTBI-DSANet achieved the best accuracy of 0.834, which is significantly better than peer methods. The experiments demonstrated the potential of the mTBI-DSANet in assisting mTBI diagnosis.