Logo image
Exploring Structural Brain Connectivity in Term and Preterm Infants with Explainable AI and Fuzzy Logic
Conference proceeding   Open access   Peer reviewed

Exploring Structural Brain Connectivity in Term and Preterm Infants with Explainable AI and Fuzzy Logic

Katherine Emily Birch, Alberto Durán-López, Daniel Bolaños-Martinez, Chandresh Pravin, Maria Bermudez-Edo, Roman Bauer and Suparna De
CEUR workshop proceedings, Vol.4061
Second Multimodal, Affective and Interactive eXplainable AI Workshop (MAI-XAI 2025) co-located with the 28th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence 25-30 October 2025 (ECAI 2025) (Bologna, 25/10/2025–30/10/2025)
Autumn 2025

Abstract

Preterm birth Explainable AI (XAI) Brain Development Fuzzy logic Machine Learning

Preterm births have been associated with altered neurological development for neonatal infants, this has been implicated in certain neurodevelopmental conditions in later life. Advances in brain imaging methods, such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging, have allowed for the analysis of physical connectivity of brain matter in infants shortly after birth. However, commonly used methods of investigating such data rely on a brain network analysis, traditionally based on graph-theoretical approaches, which may fail to capture complex patterns involving both local and global network structures and spatial information. Furthermore, many previous studies of infant brain data rely on a priori selection of specific graph connectivity measures. We propose employing machine learning models such as logistic regression and Graph Neural Networks to provide a data-driven approach for classifying preterm and term brain networks at birth. We utilize fuzzy logic, and explainability methods including Shapley Additive Explanations to identify influential regions and connections in decision making. In our analysis, brain regions are represented as spatially embedded nodes, with edges representing strength of structural connections between areas. Using this setup, our model achieves a binary classification accuracy of 88.57%. This performance is further enhanced using a fuzzy boundary between preterm and term classes, achieving an accuracy of 96.19%. This demonstrates that the model can be assisted particularly by adding context to 'near-term' born infant cases. These analyses highlight important connections, and key nodes including deep brain structures which are broadly consistent with biological literature.

pdf
MAI-XAI25_paper_17 (2)6.87 MBDownloadView
Published (Version of record)CC BY V4.0 Open Access
url
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-4061/View
Published (Version of record)CC BY V4.0 Open

Metrics

87 File views/ downloads
30 Record Views

Details

Logo image

Usage Policy