A Common Spectrum Underlying Brain Disorders Across Lifespan Revealed by Deep Learning on Brain Networks

Brain disorders in the early and late life of humans potentially share pathological alterations in brain functions. However, the key neuroimaging evidence remains unrevealed for elucidating such commonness and the relationships among these disorders. To explore this puzzle, we build a restricted single-branch deep learning model, using multi-site functional magnetic resonance imaging data (N=4,410, 6 sites), for classifying 5 different early- and late-life brain disorders from healthy controls (cognitively unimpaired). Our model achieves 62.6±1.9% overall classification accuracy and thus supports us in detecting a set of commonly affected functional subnetworks, including default mode, executive control, visual, and limbic networks. In the deep-layer representation of data, we observe young and aging patients with disorders are continuously distributed, which is in line with the clinical concept of the “spectrum of disorders”. The relationships among brain disorders from the revealed spectrum promote the understanding of disorder comorbidities and time associations in the lifespan.