arXiv Computer Vision

Interpretable Brain Age Prediction Using White Matter Fiber Orientation Distributions with Rotation-Equivariant Deep Learning

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 5

FiberGeoText: A Vision-Language Model for Population- Level Organization of Superficial White Matter

FiberGeoText (FGT) is a vision‑language model that clusters short‑range superficial white matter streamlines from ultra‑high‑resolution diffusion MRI into population‑level groups. It jointly encodes each streamline’s 3‑D trajectory, cortical anatomical context (via text from multiple parcellation schemes), and shape, using a pretrained large language model to unify heterogeneous anatomical descriptions. Evaluations on 0.76 mm diffusion data show that FGT outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods in cortical parcel coherence, shape consistency, cluster‑size consistency, and cross‑subject correspondence, and it generalizes well to unseen subjects, recovering 96.7 % of learned clusters.

By Yuqian Chen, R. Jarrett Rushmore, Guikun Chen, Fan Zhang, Edward Yeterian, Nikos Makris, Yogesh Rathi, Lauren J. O'Donnell
arXiv AI
Jun 10

Tractogram foundation model

arXiv:2606. 09893v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion MRI (dMRI) tractography is the only noninvasive approach for mapping white-matter pathways in the living human brain.

By Guikun Chen, Yuqian Chen, Yijie Li, Yogesh Rathi, Nikos Makris, Fan Zhang, Wenguan Wang, Lauren J. O'Donnell
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

A Generalizable Feature Extractor for Alzheimer's-Related Brain MRI Tasks

The study investigates whether a compact, supervised 3D CNN pretrained for brain‑age prediction can act as a reusable foundation model for various Alzheimer's‑related neuroimaging tasks. By freezing the 7.18 million weights and adding only ~1 % of trainable parameters via Low‑Rank Adaptation, the model achieved high performance across six experiments, including dementia classification, MCI progression prediction, amyloid positivity detection, and volume estimation of hippocampal and white matter hypointensities. The results demonstrate that the pretrained brain‑age model generalizes well to new datasets without retraining, offering a data‑efficient alternative to larger networks.

By Reza Rajabli, D. Louis Collins
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Bridging Modalities on the Cortex: Surface-based MRI to PET Translation with a Diffusion Bridge

The paper introduces DB‑SUiT, a surface‑based diffusion bridge that translates cortical MRI to PET images directly on the cortical manifold. It employs a conditional spherical U‑shaped vision Transformer to capture multi‑scale surface features and long‑range dependencies while incorporating demographic and subcortical information. Evaluations on two dementia datasets show that the synthesized PET surfaces outperform MRI and PET volumes in automated classification and achieve high diagnostic accuracy in a blinded reader study.

By Yitong Li, Alexandra Samoylova, Fabian Bongratz, Timo Grimmer, Dennis M. Hedderich, Igor Yakushev, Christian Wachinger
arXiv AI
Sep 18

A Two-Stage Multi-Modal MRI Framework for Lifespan Brain Age Prediction

The paper introduces a two-stage multi‑modal MRI framework that processes different MRI modalities independently before integrating them through late fusion. First, the model estimates a probability distribution over six developmental stages, then it predicts age using probability‑weighted, stage‑specialized experts. Experiments across nine datasets—from fetal to elderly—show the method outperforms existing baselines, reducing mean absolute error by 13% and 78% in in‑domain and out‑of‑domain settings, and multi‑modal integration yields 12‑13% performance gains. Analysis on ADNI clinical groups indicates that the predicted brain age gap could help characterize Alzheimer’s‑related brain aging.

By Dingyi Zhang, Ruiying Liu, Yun Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 12

Riemannian Shape Analysis of the Corpus Callosum in Kendall Space: Aging and Alzheimer's Disease

The study introduces a Riemannian shape‑space framework for analyzing age‑related morphological changes in the midsagittal corpus callosum (CC) using 128 landmarks embedded in Kendall shape space. Applied to the OASIS‑1 cohort, multivariate geodesic regression identifies anterior sub‑regions (Genu and Anterior Body) as the primary sites of age‑related deformation, outperforming Euclidean benchmarks. In Alzheimer’s patients, age explains less than 0.5% of shape variance, and a tangent‑space classifier achieves an age‑group AUC of 0.791 from 2D contour data alone.

By Olakunle S. Abawonse, Fatou Fall
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

3D MRI-Based Alzheimer's Disease Classification Using Multi-Modal 3D CNN with Leakage-Aware Subject-Level Evaluation

The paper presents a multimodal 3D convolutional neural network that classifies Alzheimer’s disease using raw OASIS 1 MRI volumes. It fuses structural T1 images with gray matter, white matter, and cerebrospinal fluid probability maps to capture complementary neuroanatomical information. Evaluated with 5‑fold subject‑level cross‑validation, the model achieves a mean accuracy of 72.34 % and an ROC AUC of 0.7781, with GradCAM visualizations highlighting anatomically relevant regions such as the medial temporal lobe and ventricles.

By Md Sifat, Sania Akter, Akif Islam, Md. Ekramul Hamid, Abu Saleh Musa Miah, Najmul Hassan, Md Abdur Rahim, Jungpil Shin
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

Enhancing brain age estimation with structural MRI and synthesized cerebral blood volume maps

The study presents a multimodal BrainAGE framework that fuses structural T1-weighted MRI with DeepCBV maps—vascular information synthesized from non‑contrast MRI—to estimate brain age more accurately. Using two separate 3D convolutional neural networks, the combined model achieved a mean absolute error of 3.95 years on cognitively normal controls, outperforming single‑modality models. Saliency analyses showed MRI highlighted white matter and cortical atrophy, while DeepCBV emphasized vascular‑rich regions, and the integrated approach revealed stronger differentiation between stable and progressive MCI, indicating sensitivity to early vascular changes.

By Jordan Jomsky, Zongyu Li, Kay C. Igwe, Yiren Zhang, Max Lashley, Tal Nuriel, Andrew Laine, Scott A. Small, Jia Guo, for the Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration Neuroimaging Initiative, for the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative