Strongly Topology-Preserving GNNs for Brain Graph Super-Resolution

Brain graph super-resolution is an under-explored yet highly relevant task in network neuroscience. It circumvents the need for costly and time-consuming medical imaging data collection, preparation, and processing. Current super-resolution methods leverage graph neural networks (GNNs) thanks to their ability to natively handle graph-structured datasets. However, most GNNs perform node feature learning, which presents two significant limitations: (1) they require computationally expensive methods to learn complex node features capable of inferring connectivity strength or edge features, which do not scale to larger graphs; and (2) computations in the node space fail to adequately capture higher-order brain topologies such as cliques and hubs. However, numerous studies have shown that brain graph topology is crucial in identifying the onset and presence of various neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Motivated by these challenges and applications, we propose our Strongly Topology-Preserving GNN framework for Brain Graph Super-Resolution (STP-GSR). It is the first graph super-resolution architecture to perform representation learning in higher-order topological space. Specifically, using the primal-dual graph formulation from graph theory, we develop an efficient mapping from the edge space of our low-resolution (LR) brain graphs to the node space of a high-resolution (HR) dual graph. This approach ensures that node-level computations on this dual graph correspond naturally to edge-level learning on our HR brain graphs, thereby enforcing strong topological consistency within our framework. Additionally, our framework is GNN layer agnostic and can easily learn from smaller, scalable GNNs, significantly reducing computational requirements. We comprehensively benchmark our framework across seven key topological measures and observe that it significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods and baselines. The STP-GSR code is available at https://github.com/basiralab/STP-GSR.