Title
UNCERTAINTY-BASED BIOLOGICAL AGE ESTIMATION OF BRAIN MRI SCANS
Abstract
Age is an essential factor in modern diagnostic procedures. However, assessment of the true biological age (BA) remains a daunting task due to the lack of reference ground-truth labels. Current BA estimation approaches are either restricted to skeletal images or rely on non-imaging modalities that yield a whole-body BA assessment. However, various organ systems may exhibit different aging characteristics due to lifestyle and genetic factors. In this initial study, we propose a new framework for organ-specific BA estimation utilizing 3D magnetic resonance image (MRI) scans. As a first step, this framework predicts the chronological age (CA) together with the corresponding patient-dependent aleatoric uncertainty. An iterative training algorithm is then utilized to segregate atypical aging patients from the given population based on the predicted uncertainty scores. In this manner, we hypothesize that training a new model on the remaining population should approximate the true BA behavior. We apply the proposed methodology on a brain MRI dataset containing healthy individuals as well as Alzheimer's patients. We demonstrate the correlation between the predicted BAs and the expected cognitive deterioration in Alzheimer's patients.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/ICASSP39728.2021.9414112
2021 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH AND SIGNAL PROCESSING (ICASSP 2021)
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
Magnetic resonance imaging, biological age, chronological age, deep learning, aleatoric uncertainty
Conference
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Karim Armanious174.17
Sherif Abdulatif232.06
Wenbin Shi310.69
Tobias Hepp4183.16
Sergios Gatidis5318.17
Bin Yang653.14