Predicting age from cortical structure across the lifespan

Madan, Christopher R.; Kensinger, Elizabeth A.

Abstract

Despite inter-individual differences in cortical structure, cross-sectional and longitudinal studies have demonstrated a large degree of population-level consistency in age-related differences in brain morphology. The present study assessed how accurately an individual’s age could be predicted by estimates of cortical morphology, comparing a variety of structural measures, including thickness, gyrification, and fractal dimensionality. Structural measures were calculated across up to seven different parcellation approaches, ranging from 1 region to 1000 regions. The age-prediction framework was trained using morphological measures obtained from T1-weighted MRI volumes collected from multiple sites, yielding a training dataset of 1056 healthy adults, aged 18-97. Age predictions were calculated using a machine-learning approach that incorporated non-linear differences over the lifespan. In two independent, held-out test samples, age predictions had a median error of 6-7 years. Age predictions were best when using a combination of cortical metrics, both thickness and fractal dimensionality. Overall, the results reveal that age-related differences in brain structure are systematic enough to enable reliable age prediction based on metrics of cortical morphology.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 15, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Feb 12, 2018
• Publication Date: Mar 3, 2018
• Deposit Date: Jan 16, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 13, 2019
• Journal: European Journal of Neuroscience
• Print ISSN: 0953-816X
• Electronic ISSN: 1460-9568
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 47
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 399-416
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/ejn.13835
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/918700
• Publisher URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ejn.13835/abstract?
• Additional Information: This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Madan, C. R. and Kensinger, E. A. (2018), Predicting age from cortical structure across the lifespan. Eur J Neurosci, 47: 399–416, which has been published in final form at doi:10.1111/ejn.13835. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.