Individualised prediction of longitudinal change in multimodal brain imaging

It remains largely unknown whether individualised longitudinal changes of brain imaging features can be predicted based only on the baseline brain images. This would be of great value, for example, for longitudinal data imputation, longitudinal brain-behaviour associations, and early prediction of brain-related diseases. We explore this possibility using longitudinal data of multiple modalities from UK Biobank brain imaging, with around 3,500 subjects. As baseline and follow-up images are generally similar in the case of short follow-up time intervals (e.g., 2 years), a simple copy of the baseline image may have a very good prediction performance. Therefore, for the first time, we propose a new mathematical framework for guiding the longitudinal prediction of brain images, providing answers to fundamental questions: (1) what is a suitable definition of longitudinal change; (2) how to detect the existence of changes; (3) what is the "null" prediction performance; and (4) can we distinguish longitudinal change prediction from simple data denoising. Building on these, we designed a deep U-Net based model for predicting longitudinal changes in multimodal brain images. Our results show that the proposed model can predict to a modest degree individualised longitudinal changes in almost all modalities, and outperforms other potential models. Furthermore, compared with the true longitudinal changes computed from real data, the predicted longitudinal changes have a similar or even improved accuracy in predicting subjects' non-imaging phenotypes, and have a high between-subject discriminability. Our study contributes a new theoretical framework for longitudinal brain imaging studies, and our results show the potential for longitudinal data imputation, along with highlighting several caveats when performing longitudinal data analysis.