Flexible Individualized Developmental Prediction of Infant Cortical Surface Maps via Intensive Triplet Autoencoder

Computational methods for prediction of the dynamic and complex development of the infant cerebral cortex are critical and highly desired for a better understanding of early brain development in health and disease. Although a few methods have been proposed, they are limited to predicting cortical surface maps at predefined ages and require a large amount of strictly paired longitudinal data at these ages for model training. However, longitudinal infant images are typically acquired at highly irregular and nonuniform scanning ages, thus leading to limited training data for these methods and low flexibility and accuracy. To address these issues, we propose a flexible framework for individualized prediction of cortical surface maps at arbitrary ages during infancy. The central idea is that a cortical surface map can be considered as an entangled representation of two distinct components: 1) the identity-related invariant features, which preserve the individual identity and 2) the age-related features, which reflect the developmental patterns. Our framework, called intensive triplet autoencoder, extracts the mixed latent feature and further disentangles it into two components with an attention-based module. Identity recognition and age estimation tasks are introduced as supervision for a reliable disentanglement. Thus, we can obtain the target individualized cortical property maps with disentangled identity-related information with specific age-related information. Moreover, an adversarial learning strategy is integrated to achieve a vivid and realistic prediction. Extensive experiments validate our method's superior capability in predicting early developing cortical surface maps flexibly and precisely, in comparison with existing methods.