ARMARecon: An ARMA Convolutional Filter based Graph Neural Network for Neurodegenerative Dementias Classification

Abstract: Early detection of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) is essential for reducing the risk of progression to severe disease stages. As AD and FTD propagate along white-matter regions in a global, graph-dependent manner, graph-based neural networks are well suited to capture these patterns. Hence, we introduce ARMARecon, a unified graph learning framework that integrates Autoregressive Moving Average (ARMA) graph filtering with a reconstruction-driven objective to enhance feature representation and improve classification accuracy. ARMARecon effectively models both local and global connectivity by leveraging 20-bin Fractional Anisotropy (FA) histogram features extracted from white-matter regions, while mitigating over-smoothing. Overall, ARMARecon achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on the multi-site dMRI datasets ADNI and NIFD.