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Robust Brain Age Estimation based on sMRI via Nonlinear Age-Adaptive Ensemble Learning

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<mark>Journal publication date</mark>31/08/2022
<mark>Journal</mark>IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering
Volume30
Number of pages11
Pages (from-to)2146 - 2156
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date13/07/22
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Precise prediction on brain age is urgently needed by many bi-omedical areas including mental rehabilitation prognosis as well as various medicine or treatment trials. People began to realize that contrasting physical (real) age and predicted brain age can help to highlight brain issues and evaluate if patients’ brains are healthy or not. Such age prediction is often challenging for sin-gle model-based prediction, while the conditions of brains vary drastically over age. In this work, we present an age-adaptive ensemble model that is based on the combination of four differ-ent machine learning algorithms, including a support vector machine (SVR), a convolutional neural network (CNN) model, and the popular GoogLeNet and ResNet deep networks. The ensemble model proposed here is nonlinearly adaptive, where age is taken as a key factor in the nonlinear combination of various single-algorithm-based independent models. In our age-adaptive ensemble method, the weights of each model are learned automatically as nonlinear functions over age instead of fixed values, while brain age estimation is based on such an age-adaptive integration of various single models. The quality of the model is quantified by the mean absolute errors (MAE) and spearman correlation between the predicted age and the actual age, with the least MAE and the highest Spearman correlation representing the highest accuracy in age prediction. By testing on the Predictive Analysis Challenge 2019 (PAC 2019) dataset, our novel ensemble model has achieved a MAE down to 3.19, which is a significantly increased accuracy in this brain age competition. If deployed in the real world, our novel ensemble model having an improved accuracy could potentially help doc-tors to identify the risk of brain diseases more accurately and quickly, thus helping pharmaceutical companies develop drugs or treatments precisely, and potential offer a new powerful tool for researchers in the field of brain science.

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©2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.