Stein Acker ¹ Jinqing Liang ¹ Ninet Sinaii ² Kristen Wingert ¹ Atsuko Kurosu ¹ Sunder Rajan ³ Sara K. Inati ⁴ William Theodore ⁴ Nadia Biassou ^1,3*

• ¹ Integrative Neuroscience of Communication Research Unit, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIH), Bethesda, Maryland, United States
• ² Biostatistics and Clinical Epidemiology Service, Clinical Center (NIH), Bethesda, Maryland, United States
• ³ Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Clinical Center (NIH), Bethesda, Maryland, United States
• ⁴ Clinical Epilepsy Service, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NIH), Bethesda, Maryland, United States

Functional connectivity (FC) refers to the activation correlation between different brain regions. FC networks as typically represented as graphs with brain regions of interest (ROIs) as nodes and functional connections as edges. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are machine learning architectures used to analyze FC graphs. However, traditional GNNs are limited in their ability to characterize FC edge attributes because they typically emphasize the importance of ROI node-based brain activation data. Line GNNs convert the edges of the original graph to nodes in the transformed graph, thereby emphasizing the FC between brain regions. We hypothesize that line GNNs will outperform traditional GNNs in FC applications. We investigated the performance of two common GNN architectures (GraphSAGE and GCN) trained on line and traditional graphs predicting task-associated FC changes across two datasets. The first dataset was from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) with 205 participants, the second was a dataset with 12 participants. The HCP dataset detailed FC changes in participants during a story-listening task, while the second dataset included the FC changes in a different auditory language task. Our findings from the HCP dataset indicated that line GNNs achieved lower mean squared error compared to traditional GNNs, with the line GraphSAGE model outperforming the traditional GraphSAGE by 18% (p<0.0001). When applying the same models to the second dataset, both line GNNs also showed statistically significant improvements over their traditional counterparts with little to no overfitting. We believe this shows that line GNN models demonstrate promising utility in FC studies.