Predicting Brain Age Using Structural Neuroimaging and Deep Learning

Abstract

Early detection of age-related diseases will greatly benefit from a model of the underlying biological aging process. In this paper, we develop a brain-age predictor by using structural magnetic resonance imaging (SMRI) and deep learning and evaluate the predicted brain age as a marker of brain-aging in Alzheimer's disease. Our approach does not require any domain knowledge in that it trains end-to-end on the SMRI image itself, and has been validated on real SMRI data collected from elderly subjects. We developed two different models by using convolutional neural network (CNN) based regression and bucket classification to predict brain ages from SMRI images. Our models achieved root mean squared errors (RMSE) of 5.54 and 6.44 years in predicting brain ages of healthy subjects. Further analysis showed that there is a substantial difference between the predicted brain ages of cognitively impaired and healthy subjects with similar chronological ages.