Neural Autoregressive Modeling of Brain Aging

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Yesiloglu, Ridvan, Peng, Wei, Islam, Md Tauhidul, Adeli, Ehsan
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866912511420268544
author Yesiloglu, Ridvan
Peng, Wei
Islam, Md Tauhidul
Adeli, Ehsan
author_facet Yesiloglu, Ridvan
Peng, Wei
Islam, Md Tauhidul
Adeli, Ehsan
contents Brain aging synthesis is a critical task with broad applications in clinical and computational neuroscience. The ability to predict the future structural evolution of a subject's brain from an earlier MRI scan provides valuable insights into aging trajectories. Yet, the high-dimensionality of data, subtle changes of structure across ages, and subject-specific patterns constitute challenges in the synthesis of the aging brain. To overcome these challenges, we propose NeuroAR, a novel brain aging simulation model based on generative autoregressive transformers. NeuroAR synthesizes the aging brain by autoregressively estimating the discrete token maps of a future scan from a convenient space of concatenated token embeddings of a previous and future scan. To guide the generation, it concatenates into each scale the subject's previous scan, and uses its acquisition age and the target age at each block via cross-attention. We evaluate our approach on both the elderly population and adolescent subjects, demonstrating superior performance over state-of-the-art generative models, including latent diffusion models (LDM) and generative adversarial networks, in terms of image fidelity. Furthermore, we employ a pre-trained age predictor to further validate the consistency and realism of the synthesized images with respect to expected aging patterns. NeuroAR significantly outperforms key models, including LDM, demonstrating its ability to model subject-specific brain aging trajectories with high fidelity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_22954
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neural Autoregressive Modeling of Brain Aging
Yesiloglu, Ridvan
Peng, Wei
Islam, Md Tauhidul
Adeli, Ehsan
Machine Learning
Image and Video Processing
Neurons and Cognition
Brain aging synthesis is a critical task with broad applications in clinical and computational neuroscience. The ability to predict the future structural evolution of a subject's brain from an earlier MRI scan provides valuable insights into aging trajectories. Yet, the high-dimensionality of data, subtle changes of structure across ages, and subject-specific patterns constitute challenges in the synthesis of the aging brain. To overcome these challenges, we propose NeuroAR, a novel brain aging simulation model based on generative autoregressive transformers. NeuroAR synthesizes the aging brain by autoregressively estimating the discrete token maps of a future scan from a convenient space of concatenated token embeddings of a previous and future scan. To guide the generation, it concatenates into each scale the subject's previous scan, and uses its acquisition age and the target age at each block via cross-attention. We evaluate our approach on both the elderly population and adolescent subjects, demonstrating superior performance over state-of-the-art generative models, including latent diffusion models (LDM) and generative adversarial networks, in terms of image fidelity. Furthermore, we employ a pre-trained age predictor to further validate the consistency and realism of the synthesized images with respect to expected aging patterns. NeuroAR significantly outperforms key models, including LDM, demonstrating its ability to model subject-specific brain aging trajectories with high fidelity.
title Neural Autoregressive Modeling of Brain Aging
topic Machine Learning
Image and Video Processing
Neurons and Cognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22954