Estimating Neuronal Ageing with Hidden Markov Models

Neuronal degeneration is widely observed in normal ageing, meanwhile the neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer's disease effects neuronal degeneration in a faster way which is considered as faster ageing. Early intervention of such disease could benefit subjects with potentials of positive clinical outcome, therefore, early detection of disease related brain structural alteration is required. In this paper, we propose a computational approach for modelling the MRI-based structure alteration with ageing using hidden Markov model. The proposed hidden Markov model based brain structural model encodes intracortical tissue/fluid distribution using discrete wavelet transformation and vector quantization. Further, it captures gray matter volume loss, which is capable of reflecting subtle intracortical changes with ageing. Experiments were carried out on healthy subjects to validate its accuracy and robustness. Results have shown its ability of predicting the brain age with prediction error of 1.98 years without training data, which shows better result than other age predition methods.