Attention-Enhanced Static-Dynamic Fusion Network for Major Depressive Disorder Diagnosis

OBJECTIVE: Accurate depression classification using fNIRS signals is critical for objective auxiliary diagnosis, yet many existing methods separately model static characteristics or temporal dynamics, limiting their ability to capture coordinated brain activity. APPROACH: This study proposes a static-dynamic fusion network for fNIRS-based depression classification that jointly models stable hemodynamic and network properties together with time-varying functional connectivity. A static feature encoder captures global and channel-wise traits, while a dynamic feature encoder employs sequential modeling with attention mechanisms to identify temporally salient neural variations. A channel-aware fusion module is further introduced to adaptively integrate static and dynamic features based on their diagnostic relevance. MAIN RESULTS: Validated on 352 subjects undergoing verbal fluency tasks, SDFN achieved 91.2% accuracy on 90-second signal segments and 81.5% on 160-second segments. SIGNIFICANCE: The proposed framework demonstrates improved classification performance over existing methods by explicitly modeling complementary static and dynamic neural features within an interpretable architecture for depression analysis.