Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Network Modelling Perfusion MRI

Abstract: Perfusion MRI (pMRI) offers valuable insights into tumor vascularity and promises to predict tumor genotypes, thus benefiting prognosis for glioma patients, yet effective models tailored to 4D pMRI are still lacking. This study presents the first attempt to model 4D pMRI using a GNN-based spatiotemporal model PerfGAT, integrating spatial information and temporal kinetics to predict Isocitrate DeHydrogenase (IDH) mutation status in glioma patients. Specifically, we propose a graph structure learning approach based on edge attention and negative graphs to optimize temporal correlations modeling. Moreover, we design a dual-attention feature fusion module to integrate spatiotemporal features while addressing tumor-related brain regions. Further, we develop a class-balanced augmentation methods tailored to spatiotemporal data, which could mitigate the common label imbalance issue in clinical datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches, promising to model pMRI effectively for patient characterization.