Ayu-Characterization of healthy aging from neuroimaging data with deep learning and rsfMRI

Estimating brain age and establishing functional biomarkers that are prescient of cognitive declines resulting from aging and different neurological diseases are still open research problems. Functional measures such as functional connectivity are gaining interest as potentially more subtle markers of neurodegeneration. However, brain functions are also affected by “normal” brain aging. More information is needed on how functional connectivity relates to aging, particularly in the absence of neurodegenerative disorders. Resting-state fMRI enables us to investigate functional brain networks and can potentially help us understand the processes of development as well as aging in terms of how functional connectivity (FC) matures during the early years and declines during the late years. We propose models for estimation of the chronological age of a healthy person from the resting state brain activation (rsfMRI). In this work, we utilized a dataset (N = 638, age-range 20–88) comprising rsfMRI images from the Cambridge Centre for Aging and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) repository of a healthy population. We propose an age prediction pipeline Ayu which consists of data preprocessing, feature selection, and an attention-based model for deep learning architecture for brain age assessment. We extracted features from the static functional connectivity (sFC) to predict the subject's age and classified them into different age groups (young, middle, middle, and old ages). To the best of our knowledge, a classification accuracy of 72.619 % and a mean absolute error of 6.797, and an r(2) of 0.754 reported by our Ayu pipeline establish competitive benchmark results as compared to the state-of-the-art-approach. Furthermore, it is vital to identify how different functional regions of the brain are correlated. We also analyzed how functional regions contribute differently across ages by applying attention-based networks and integrated gradients. We obtained well-known resting-state networks using the attention model, which maps to within the default mode network, visual network, ventral attention network, limbic network, frontoparietal network, and somatosensory network connected to aging. Our analysis of fMRI data in healthy elderly Age groups revealed that dynamic FC tends to slow down and becomes less complex and more random with increasing age.