A voxel-level approach to brain age prediction: A method to assess regional brain aging
This work addresses the need for localized brain age assessments to understand regional aging differences, particularly in clinical populations, though it is incremental in applying deep learning to an under-explored aspect of brain age prediction.
The authors tackled the problem of regional brain aging by developing a deep learning model for voxel-level brain age prediction from MRI scans, which outperformed existing methods and revealed disparities in aging trajectories between healthy subjects and those with neurological disorders like Alzheimer's disease.
Brain aging is a regional phenomenon, a facet that remains relatively under-explored within the realm of brain age prediction research using machine learning methods. Voxel-level predictions can provide localized brain age estimates that can provide granular insights into the regional aging processes. This is essential to understand the differences in aging trajectories in healthy versus diseased subjects. In this work, a deep learning-based multitask model is proposed for voxel-level brain age prediction from T1-weighted magnetic resonance images. The proposed model outperforms the models existing in the literature and yields valuable clinical insights when applied to both healthy and diseased populations. Regional analysis is performed on the voxel-level brain age predictions to understand aging trajectories of known anatomical regions in the brain and show that there exist disparities in regional aging trajectories of healthy subjects compared to ones with underlying neurological disorders such as Dementia and more specifically, Alzheimer's disease. Our code is available at https://github.com/nehagianchandani/Voxel-level-brain-age-prediction.