Geometric Deep Learning for Post-Menstrual Age Prediction based on the Neonatal White Matter Cortical Surface
This provides an accurate age estimation method for neonates, which is crucial for assessing neurodevelopmental outcomes, though it appears incremental as it compares existing geometric deep learning architectures.
The paper tackled predicting post-menstrual age in neonates using geometric deep learning on the white matter cortical surface, achieving a mean error of less than one week on a dataset of 650 subjects.
Accurate estimation of the age in neonates is essential for measuring neurodevelopmental, medical, and growth outcomes. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to predict the post-menstrual age (PA) at scan, using techniques from geometric deep learning, based on the neonatal white matter cortical surface. We utilize and compare multiple specialized neural network architectures that predict the age using different geometric representations of the cortical surface; we compare MeshCNN, Pointnet++, GraphCNN, and a volumetric benchmark. The dataset is part of the Developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP), and is a cohort of healthy and premature neonates. We evaluate our approach on 650 subjects (727scans) with PA ranging from 27 to 45 weeks. Our results show accurate prediction of the estimated PA, with mean error less than one week.