Predicting brain age using Tri-UNet and various MRI scale features

Abstract

In the process of human aging, significant age-related changes occur in brain tissue. To assist individuals in assessing the degree of brain aging, screening for disease risks, and further diagnosing age-related diseases, it is crucial to develop an accurate method for predicting brain age. This paper proposes a multi-scale feature fusion method called Tri-UNet based on the U-Net network structure, as well as a brain region information fusion method based on multi-channel input networks. These methods address the issue of insufficient image feature learning in brain neuroimaging data. They can effectively utilize features at different scales of MRI and fully leverage feature information from different regions of the brain. In the end, experiments were conducted on the Cam-CAN dataset, resulting in a minimum Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 7.46. The results demonstrate that this method provides a new approach to feature learning at different scales in brain age prediction tasks, contributing to the advancement of the field and holding significance for practical applications in the context of elderly education.