Brain Ages Derived from Different MRI Modalities are Associated with Distinct Biological Phenotypes

Abstract

Brain ageing is a highly variable, spatially and temporally heterogeneous process, marked by numerous structural and functional changes. These can cause discrepancies between individuals’ chronological age and the apparent age of their brain, as inferred from neuroimaging data. Machine learning models, and particularly Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have proven adept in capturing patterns relating to ageing induced changes in the brain. The differences between the predicted and chronological ages, referred to as brain age deltas, have emerged as useful biomarkers for exploring those factors which promote accelerated ageing or resilience, such as pathologies or lifestyle factors. However, previous studies rely only on structural neuroimaging for predictions, overlooking potentially informative functional and microstructural changes. Here we show that multiple contrasts derived from different MRI modalities can predict brain age, each encoding bespoke brain ageing information. By using 3D CNNs and UK Biobank data, we found that 57 contrasts derived from structural, susceptibility-weighted, diffusion, and functional MRI can successfully predict brain age. For each contrast, different patterns of association with non-imaging phenotypes were found, resulting in a total of 191 unique, statistically significant associations. Furthermore, we found that ensembling data from multiple contrasts results in both higher prediction accuracies and stronger correlations to non-imaging measurements. Our results demonstrate that other 3D contrasts and modalities, which have not been considered so far for the task of brain age prediction, encode different information about the ageing brain. We envision our work as being the starting point for future investigations into the causal links underpinning the observed brain age deltas and non-imaging measurement associations. For instance, drug effects can be monitored, given that certain medications correlated with accelerated brain ageing. Furthermore, continued development of brain age models could facilitate their deployment in clinical trials for recruitment and monitoring, and hospitals for diagnostic and screening tasks.

Data Description

This dataset contains the full correlation results with all nIDPs in the UK Biobank. These are presented in datasets split by sex in Female and Male subjects. For easier data manipulation, two smaller datasets have also been made available, containing just those correlation which pass the False Discovery Rate (FDR) threshold. 

As experiments were also conducted for ensembles using multiple contrasts, similar datasets are provided for those.

Finally, global datasets are also provided. These are the concatenation of the associations contained in the Male and Female datasets.

Paper & Code

The original paper for this article can be accessed here:

• https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10196736

To access the codes relevant for this project, please access the project GitHub Repos:

• https://github.com/AndreiRoibu/AgeMapper

If using this work, please cite it based on the above paper, or using the following BibTex:

@inproceedings{roibu2023brain,
  title={Brain Ages Derived from Different MRI Modalities are Associated with Distinct Biological Phenotypes},
  author={Roibu, Andrei-Claudiu and Adaszewski, Stanislaw and Schindler, Torsten and Smith, Stephen M and Namburete, Ana IL and Lange, Frederik J},
  booktitle={2023 10th IEEE Swiss Conference on Data Science (SDS)},
  pages={17--25},
  year={2023},
  organization={IEEE},
  doi={10.1109/SDS57534.2023.00010}
}

Data Access

The data for this project is freely available upon application at the UK Biobank. For more information regarding the individual nIDPs, please access the UK Biobank Showcase website at: https://biobank.ctsu.ox.ac.uk/showcase/search.cgi

Funding

ACR is supported by EPSRC Grant EP/S024093/1, F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG and a 2021 Industrial Fellowship offered by the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. SMS is supported by a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award 215573/Z/19/Z. AILN is grateful for support from the Academy of Medical Sciences under the Springboard Awards scheme (SBF005/1136), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. FJL is supported by a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award (215573/Z/19/Z). The WIN is supported by core funding from the Wellcome Trust (203139/Z/16/Z). The computational aspects were supported by the Wellcome Trust (203141/Z/16/Z) and the NIHR Oxford BRC. Corresponding authors: ACR (andreiroibu@icloud.com), SA (stanislaw.adaszewski@roche.com) and AILN (ana.namburete@cs.ox.ac.uk).