Federation of Brain Age Estimation in Structural Neuroimaging Data

Brain age estimation is a widely used approach to evaluate the impact of various neurological or psychiatric brain disorders on the brain developmental or aging process. Current studies show that neuroimaging data can be used to predict brain age, as it captures structural and functional changes that the brain undergoes during development and the aging process. A robust brain age prediction model not only has the potential in assisting early diagnosis of brain disorders but also helps in monitoring and evaluating effects of a treatment. Although access to large amounts of data helps build better models and validate their effectiveness, researchers often have limited access to brain data because of its challenging and expensive acquisition process. This data is not always sharable due to privacy restrictions. Decentralized models provide a way which does not require data exchange between the multiple involved groups. In this work, we propose a decentralized approach for brain age prediction and evaluate our models using features extracted from structural MRI data. Results demonstrate that our decentralized brain age model achieves similar performance compared to the models trained with all the data in one location.