  Human brains lie at the core of complex neurobiological systems, where the
neurons, circuits, and subsystems interact in enigmatic ways. Understanding the
structural and functional mechanisms of the brain has long been an intriguing
pursuit for neuroscience research and clinical disorder therapy. Mapping the
connections of the human brain as a network is one of the most pervasive
paradigms in neuroscience. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently emerged
as a potential method for modeling complex network data. Deep models, on the
other hand, have low interpretability, which prevents their usage in
decision-critical contexts like healthcare. To bridge this gap, we propose an
interpretable framework to analyze disorder-specific Regions of Interest (ROIs)
and prominent connections. The proposed framework consists of two modules: a
brain-network-oriented backbone model for disease prediction and a globally
shared explanation generator that highlights disorder-specific biomarkers
including salient ROIs and important connections. We conduct experiments on
three real-world datasets of brain disorders. The results verify that our
framework can obtain outstanding performance and also identify meaningful
biomarkers. All code for this work is available at
https://github.com/HennyJie/IBGNN.git.
