Community-Aware Graph Transformer for Brain Disorder Identification

Abnormal brain functional network is an effective biomarker for brain disease diagnosis. Most existing methods focus on mining discriminative information from whole-brain connectivity patterns. However, multi-level collaboration is the foundation of efficient brain function, in addition to the whole-brain network, there are multiple sub-networks that can quickly integrate and process specific cognitive functions, forming the modular community structure of the brain. To address this gap, we propose a novel method, community-aware graph Transformer (CAGT), that integrates the community information of sub-networks and the topological information of brain graph into the Transformer architecture for better brain disorder identification. CAGT enhances information exchange within and between functional communities through dual-scale feature fusion, capturing interactive information across various scales. Additionally, it incorporates prior knowledge to design brain region position encoding and guide the self-attention, thereby enhancing the spatial awareness of the Transformer and aligning it with the brain's natural information transfer process. Experimental results indicate that our proposed method significantly improves performance on both large and small datasets, and can reliably capture the interactions between sub-networks, demonstrating its generalization and interpretability.