Going deeper with brain morphometry using neural networks
This work addresses the need for more accurate biomarkers in neurodegenerative disease diagnosis, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing neural network approaches.
The paper tackled the problem of low accuracy in deep learning models for brain morphometry measurements from MRI, and the result was HerstonNet, which improved agreement with silver-standard measurements by 24.30% while maintaining competitive run-time.
Brain morphometry from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a consolidated biomarker for many neurodegenerative diseases. Recent advances in this domain indicate that deep convolutional neural networks can infer morphometric measurements within a few seconds. Nevertheless, the accuracy of the devised model for insightful bio-markers (mean curvature and thickness) remains unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a more accurate and efficient neural network model for brain morphometry named HerstonNet. More specifically, we develop a 3D ResNet-based neural network to learn rich features directly from MRI, design a multi-scale regression scheme by predicting morphometric measures at feature maps of different resolutions, and leverage a robust optimization method to avoid poor quality minima and reduce the prediction variance. As a result, HerstonNet improves the existing approach by 24.30% in terms of intraclass correlation coefficient (agreement measure) to FreeSurfer silver-standards while maintaining a competitive run-time.