Longitudinal assessment of brain atrophy, particularly in the hippocampus, is
a well-studied biomarker for neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's
disease (AD). In clinical trials, estimation of brain progressive rates can be
applied to track therapeutic efficacy of disease modifying treatments. However,
most state-of-the-art measurements calculate changes directly by segmentation
and/or deformable registration of MRI images, and may misreport head motion or
MRI artifacts as neurodegeneration, impacting their accuracy. In our previous
study, we developed a deep learning method DeepAtrophy that uses a
convolutional neural network to quantify differences between longitudinal MRI
scan pairs that are associated with time. DeepAtrophy has high accuracy in
inferring temporal information from longitudinal MRI scans, such as temporal
order or relative inter-scan interval. DeepAtrophy also provides an overall
atrophy score that was shown to perform well as a potential biomarker of
disease progression and treatment efficacy. However, DeepAtrophy is not
interpretable, and it is unclear what changes in the MRI contribute to
progression measurements. In this paper, we propose Regional Deep Atrophy
(RDA), which combines the temporal inference approach from DeepAtrophy with a
deformable registration neural network and attention mechanism that highlights
regions in the MRI image where longitudinal changes are contributing to
temporal inference. RDA has similar prediction accuracy as DeepAtrophy, but its
additional interpretability makes it more acceptable for use in clinical
settings, and may lead to more sensitive biomarkers for disease monitoring in
clinical trials of early AD.

通过结合时间推断、可变形配准神经网络和注意力机制，本文提出了区域性深度萎缩（RDA）方法用于通过 MRI 图像监测神经退行性疾病（如阿尔茨海默病）的病程变化，同时提供了解释性更强的研究结果。

区域深度萎缩：一种自监督学习方法，用于从纵向磁共振成像中自动识别与阿尔茨海默病进展有关的区域

Regional Deep Atrophy: a Self-Supervised Learning Method to  Automatically Identify Regions Associated With Alzheimer's Disease  Progression From Longitudinal MRI