Dynamic functional connectivity analysis with temporal convolutional network for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder identification.

Introduction: Dynamic functional connectivity (dFC), which can capture the abnormality of brain activity over time in resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data, has a natural advantage in revealing the abnormal mechanism of brain activity in patients with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Several deep learning methods have been proposed to learn dynamic changes from rs-fMRI for FC analysis, and achieved superior performance than those using static FC. However, most existing methods only consider dependencies of two adjacent timestamps, which is limited when the change is related to the course of many timestamps. Methods: In this paper, we propose a novel Temporal Dependence neural Network (TDNet) for FC representation learning and temporal-dependence relationship tracking from rs-fMRI time series for automated ADHD identification. Specifically, we first partition rs-fMRI time series into a sequence of consecutive and non-overlapping segments. For each segment, we design an FC generation module to learn more discriminative representations to construct dynamic FCs. Then, we employ the Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) to efficiently capture long-range temporal patterns with dilated convolutions, followed by three fully connected layers for disease prediction. Results: As the results, we found that considering the dynamic characteristics of rs-fMRI time series data is beneficial to obtain better diagnostic performance. In addition, dynamic FC networks generated in a data-driven manner are more informative than those constructed by Pearson correlation coefficients. Discussion: We validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach through extensive experiments on the public ADHD-200 database, and the results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over state-of-the-art methods in ADHD identification.