Christian Gaser

Hao-Chun Yang, Sicheng Dai, Saige Rutherford et al.

Unsupervised anomaly detection in brain imaging is challenging. In this paper, we propose self-supervised masked mesh learning for unsupervised anomaly detection on 3D cortical surfaces. Our framework leverages the intrinsic geometry of the cortical surface to learn a self-supervised representation that captures the underlying structure of the brain. We introduce a masked mesh convolutional neural network (MMN) that learns to predict masked regions of the cortical surface. By training the MMN on a large dataset of healthy subjects, we learn a representation that captures the normal variation in the cortical surface. We then use this representation to detect anomalies in unseen individuals by calculating anomaly scores based on the reconstruction error of the MMN. We evaluated our framework by training on population-scale dataset UKB and HCP-Aging and testing on two datasets of Alzheimer's disease patients ADNI and OASIS3. Our results show that our framework can detect anomalies in cortical thickness, cortical volume, and cortical sulcus characteristics, which are known to be biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease. Our proposed framework provides a promising approach for unsupervised anomaly detection based on normative variation of cortical features.

Tim Hahn, Jan Ernsting, Nils R. Winter et al.

The deviation between chronological age and age predicted from neuroimaging data has been identified as a sensitive risk-marker of cross-disorder brain changes, growing into a cornerstone of biological age-research. However, Machine Learning models underlying the field do not consider uncertainty, thereby confounding results with training data density and variability. Also, existing models are commonly based on homogeneous training sets, often not independently validated, and cannot be shared due to data protection issues. Here, we introduce an uncertainty-aware, shareable, and transparent Monte-Carlo Dropout Composite-Quantile-Regression (MCCQR) Neural Network trained on N=10,691 datasets from the German National Cohort. The MCCQR model provides robust, distribution-free uncertainty quantification in high-dimensional neuroimaging data, achieving lower error rates compared to existing models across ten recruitment centers and in three independent validation samples (N=4,004). In two examples, we demonstrate that it prevents spurious associations and increases power to detect accelerated brain-aging. We make the pre-trained model publicly available.