# Multimodal brain age estimation using interpretable adaptive population-graph learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.04639 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04639/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Stochastic Beams and Where to Find Them: The Gumbel-Top-k Trick for Sampling Sequences Without Replacement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06059/) (2019)
- [Graph Neural Networks for Graphs with Heterophily: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07082/) (2022)
- [Disease Prediction using Graph Convolutional Networks: Application to Autism Spectrum Disorder and Alzheimer's Disease](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01738/) (2018)
- [Differentiable Graph Module (DGM) for Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04999/) (2020)
- [Predicting brain age with deep learning from raw imaging data results in a reliable and heritable biomarker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02572/) (2016)
- [Graph-Based Deep Learning for Medical Diagnosis and Analysis: Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13137/) (2021)
- [InceptionGCN: Receptive Field Aware Graph Convolutional Network for Disease Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04233/) (2019)
- [Latent-Graph Learning for Disease Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13620/) (2020)
- [Multi-modal Graph Learning for Disease Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05880/) (2022)
- [Edge-variational Graph Convolutional Networks for Uncertainty-aware Disease Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02759/) (2020)
- [Bootstrapping Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Autism Spectrum Disorder Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07487/) (2017)
- [IA-GCN: Interpretable Attention based Graph Convolutional Network for Disease prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15587/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [A Comparative Study of Population-Graph Construction Methods and Graph Neural Networks for Brain Age Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14816/) (2023)
- [Extended Graph Assessment Metrics for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10112/) (2023)
- [Interpretable graph-based models on multimodal biomedical data integration: A technical review and benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01696/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Brain age estimation is clinically important as it can provide valuable information in the context of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. Population graphs, which include multimodal imaging information of the subjects along with the relationships among the population, have been used in literature along with Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and have proved beneficial for a variety of medical imaging tasks. A population graph is usually static and constructed manually using non-imaging information. However, graph construction is not a trivial task and might significantly affect the performance of the GCN, which is inherently very sensitive to the graph structure. In this work, we propose a framework that learns a population graph structure optimized for the downstream task. An attention mechanism assigns weights to a set of imaging and non-imaging features (phenotypes), which are then used for edge extraction. The resulting graph is used to train the GCN. The entire pipeline can be trained end-to-end. Additionally, by visualizing the attention weights that were the most important for the graph construction, we increase the interpretability of the graph. We use the UK Biobank, which provides a large variety of neuroimaging and non-imaging phenotypes, to evaluate our method on brain age regression and classification. The proposed method outperforms competing static graph approaches and other state-of-the-art adaptive methods. We further show that the assigned attention scores indicate that there are both imaging and non-imaging phenotypes that are informative for brain age estimation and are in agreement with the relevant literature.