EEG-SeeGraph: Interpreting functional connectivity disruptions in dementias via sparse-explanatory dynamic EEG-graph learning

Fengcheng Wu (Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China), Zhenxi Song (Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China), Guoyang Xu (Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China), Kaisong Hu (Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China), Zirui Wang (Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China), Yi Guo (Institute of Neurological Diseases, Shenzhen Bay Laboratory, Shenzhen), Zhiguo Zhang (Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China)

Robust and interpretable dementia diagnosis from noisy, non-stationary electroencephalography (EEG) is clinically essential yet remains challenging. To this end, we propose SeeGraph, a Sparse-Explanatory dynamic EEG-graph network that models time-evolving functional connectivity and employs a node-guided sparse edge mask to reveal the connections that drive diagnostic decisions, while remaining robust to noise and cross-site variability. SeeGraph comprises four components: (1) a dual-trajectory temporal encoder that models dynamic EEG with two streams, where node signals capture regional oscillations and edge signals capture interregional coupling; (2) a topology-aware positional encoder that derives graph-spectral Laplacian coordinates from the fused connectivity and augments node embeddings; (3) a node-guided sparse explanatory edge mask that gates the connectivity into a compact subgraph; and (4) a gated graph predictor that operates on the sparsified graph. The framework is trained using cross-entropy loss together with a sparsity regularizer on the mask, yielding noise-robust and interpretable diagnoses. The effectiveness of SeeGraph is validated on public and in-house EEG cohorts, including patients with neurodegenerative dementias and healthy controls, under both raw and noise-perturbed conditions. Its sparse, node-guided explanations highlight disease-relevant connections and align with established clinical findings on functional connectivity alterations, thereby offering transparent cues for neurological evaluation.

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Knowledge Graph

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