Vessels hiding in plain sight: quantifying brain vascular morphology in anatomical MR images using deep learning

Non-invasive assessment of brain blood vessels with magnetic resonance (MR) imaging provides important information about brain health and aging. Time-of-flight MR angiography (TOF-MRA) in particular is commonly used to assess the morphology of blood vessels, but acquisition of MRA is time-consuming and is not as commonly employed in research studies or in the clinic as the more standard T1- or T2-weighted MR contrasts (T1w/T2w). To enable quantification of brain blood vessel morphology in T1w/T2w images, we trained a neural network model, anat2vessels, on a dataset with paired MR/MRA. The model provides accurate segmentations as assessed in cross-validation on ground truth images, particularly in cases where T2w images are used. In addition, correlation between features that are extracted from model-based vessel segmentations and from ground truth account for as much as 78% of the variance in these features. We further evaluated the model in another dataset that does not include MRA and found that anat2vessels-based vessel morphology features contain information about aging that is not captured by cortical thickness features that are routinely extracted from T1w/T2w images. Moreover, we found that vessel morphology features are associated with individual variability in blood pressure and cognitive abilities. Taken together these results suggest that anat2vessels could be fruitfully applied to a range of existing and new datasets to assess the role of brain blood vessels in aging and brain health. The methods are provided as open-source software in https://github.com/nrdg/anat2vessels/.