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Main Authors: Alotaibi, Nojod M., Alhothali, Areej M., Ali, Manar S.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12143
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author Alotaibi, Nojod M.
Alhothali, Areej M.
Ali, Manar S.
author_facet Alotaibi, Nojod M.
Alhothali, Areej M.
Ali, Manar S.
contents Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a prevalent mental health condition that negatively impacts both individual well-being and global public health. Automated detection of MDD using structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) and deep learning (DL) methods holds increasing promise for improving diagnostic accuracy and enabling early intervention. Most existing methods employ either voxel-level features or handcrafted regional representations built from predefined brain atlases, limiting their ability to capture complex brain patterns. This paper develops a unified pipeline that utilizes Vision Transformers (ViTs) for extracting 3D region embeddings from sMRI data and Graph Neural Network (GNN) for classification. We explore two strategies for defining regions: (1) an atlas-based approach using predefined structural and functional brain atlases, and (2) an cube-based method by which ViTs are trained directly to identify regions from uniformly extracted 3D patches. Further, cosine similarity graphs are generated to model interregional relationships, and guide GNN-based classification. Extensive experiments were conducted using the REST-meta-MDD dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model. With stratified 10-fold cross-validation, the best model obtained 81.51\% accuracy, 85.94\% sensitivity, 76.36\% specificity, 80.88\% precision, and 83.33\% F1-score. Further, atlas-based models consistently outperformed the cube-based approach, highlighting the importance of using domain-specific anatomical priors for MDD detection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_12143
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle 3DViT-GAT: A Unified Atlas-Based 3D Vision Transformer and Graph Learning Framework for Major Depressive Disorder Detection Using Structural MRI Data
Alotaibi, Nojod M.
Alhothali, Areej M.
Ali, Manar S.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
62P10, 68T07, 92B20
I.2.6; J.3
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a prevalent mental health condition that negatively impacts both individual well-being and global public health. Automated detection of MDD using structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) and deep learning (DL) methods holds increasing promise for improving diagnostic accuracy and enabling early intervention. Most existing methods employ either voxel-level features or handcrafted regional representations built from predefined brain atlases, limiting their ability to capture complex brain patterns. This paper develops a unified pipeline that utilizes Vision Transformers (ViTs) for extracting 3D region embeddings from sMRI data and Graph Neural Network (GNN) for classification. We explore two strategies for defining regions: (1) an atlas-based approach using predefined structural and functional brain atlases, and (2) an cube-based method by which ViTs are trained directly to identify regions from uniformly extracted 3D patches. Further, cosine similarity graphs are generated to model interregional relationships, and guide GNN-based classification. Extensive experiments were conducted using the REST-meta-MDD dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model. With stratified 10-fold cross-validation, the best model obtained 81.51\% accuracy, 85.94\% sensitivity, 76.36\% specificity, 80.88\% precision, and 83.33\% F1-score. Further, atlas-based models consistently outperformed the cube-based approach, highlighting the importance of using domain-specific anatomical priors for MDD detection.
title 3DViT-GAT: A Unified Atlas-Based 3D Vision Transformer and Graph Learning Framework for Major Depressive Disorder Detection Using Structural MRI Data
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
62P10, 68T07, 92B20
I.2.6; J.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12143