Learning-based inference of longitudinal image changes: Applications in embryo development, wound healing, and aging brain

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Kim, Heejong; Karaman, Batuhan K.; Zhao, Qingyu; Wang, Alan Q.; Sabuncu, Mert R.
• 署名单位: Cornell University; Weill Cornell Medicine; Cornell University; Stanford University
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-14095
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2411492122
• 发表日期: 2025-02-20
• 关键词: cortical thickness; abnormal findings; AGE

摘要

Longitudinal imaging data are routinely acquired for health studies and patient monitoring. A central goal in longitudinal studies is tracking relevant change time. Traditional methods remove nuisance variation with custom pipelines to focus on significant changes. In this work, we present a machine learning-based method that automatically ignores irrelevant changes and extracts the time-varying signal interest. Our method, called Learning-based Inference of Longitudinal imAge Changes (LILAC), performs a pairwise comparison of longitudinal images in order to make temporal difference prediction. LILAC employs a convolutional Siamese architecture to extract feature pairs, followed by subtraction and a bias-free fully connected to learn meaningful temporal image differences. We first showcase LILAC's ability to capture key longitudinal changes by simply training it to predict the temporal ordering of images. In our experiments, temporal ordering accuracy exceeded 0.98, and predicted time differences were strongly correlated with actual changes in relevant variables (Pearson Correlation Coefficient r = 0.911 with embryo phase change, and r = 0.875 with time interval in wound healing). Next, we trained LILAC explicitly predict specific targets, such as the change in clinical scores in patients mild cognitive impairment. LILAC models achieved over a 40% reduction in mean square error compared to baseline methods. Our empirical results demonstrate that LILAC effectively localizes and quantifies relevant individual-level changes longitudinal imaging data, offering valuable insights for studying temporal mechanisms or guiding clinical decisions.