MIMIR: Deep Regression for Automated Analysis of UK Biobank MRI Scans

UK Biobank (UKB) has recruited more than 500 000 volunteers from the United Kingdom, collecting health-related information on genetics, lifestyle, blood biochemistry, and more. Ongoing medical imaging of 100 000 participants with 70 000 follow-up sessions will yield up to 170 000 MRI scans, enabling image analysis of body composition, organs, and muscle. This study presents an experimental inference engine for automated analysis of UKB neck-to-knee body 1.5-T MRI scans. This retrospective cross-validation study includes data from 38 916 participants (52% female; mean age, 64 years) to capture baseline characteristics, such as age, height, weight, and sex, as well as measurements of body composition, organ volumes, and abstract properties, such as grip strength, pulse rate, and type 2 diabetes status. Prediction intervals for each end point were generated based on uncertainty quantification. On a subsequent release of UKB data, the proposed method predicted 12 body composition metrics with a 3% median error and yielded mostly well-calibrated individual prediction intervals. The processing of MRI scans from 1000 participants required 10 minutes. The underlying method used convolutional neural networks for image-based mean-variance regression on two-dimensional representations of the MRI data. An implementation was made publicly available for fast and fully automated estimation of 72 different measurements from future releases of UKB image data. Keywords: MRI, Adipose Tissue, Obesity, Metabolic Disorders, Volume Analysis, Whole-Body Imaging, Quantification, Supervised Learning, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) © RSNA, 2022.