Title
T1 white/gray contrast as a predictor of chronological age, and an index of cognitive performance.
Abstract
Knowing the maturational schedule of typical brain development is critical to our ability to identify deviations from it; such deviations have been related to cognitive performance and even developmental disorders. Chronological age can be predicted from brain images with considerable accuracy, but with limited spatial specificity, particularly in the case of the cerebral cortex. Methods using multi-modal data have shown the greatest accuracy, but have made limited use of cortical measures. Methods using complex measures derived from voxels throughout the brain have also shown great accuracy, but are difficult to interpret in terms of cortical development. Measures based on cortical surfaces have yielded less accurate predictions, suggesting that perhaps cortical maturation is less strongly related to chronological age than is maturation of deep white matter or subcortical structures. We question this suggestion. We show that a simple metric based on the white/gray contrast at the inner border of the cortex is a good predictor of chronological age. We demonstrate this in two large datasets: the NIH Pediatric Data, with 832 scans of typically developing children, adolescents, and young adults; and the Pediatric Imaging, Neurocognition, and Genetics data, with 760 scans of individuals in a similar age-range. Further, our usage of an elastic net penalized linear regression model reveals the brain regions which contribute most to age-prediction. Moreover, we show that the residuals of age-prediction based on this white/gray contrast metric are not merely random errors, but are strongly related to IQ, suggesting that this metric is sensitive to aspects of brain development that reflect cognitive performance.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.02.050
NeuroImage
Keywords
Field
DocType
Brain-age,Age prediction,White/gray-contrast,Cortical thickness,Cognitive performance,IQ
Voxel,White matter,Biology,Young adult,Human brain,Artificial intelligence,Bioinformatics,Effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance,Neurocognitive,Cartography,Gray (unit),Linear regression
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
173
1053-8119
5
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.43
16
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
John Lewis1233.22
Alan Evans279942.82
Jussi Tohka342935.95