Longitudinally Consistent Individualized Prediction of Infant Cortical Morphological Development

Neurodevelopment is exceptionally dynamic and critical during infancy, as many neurodevelopmental disorders emerge from abnormal brain development during this stage. Obtaining a full trajectory of neurodevelopment from existing incomplete longitudinal data can enrich our limited understanding of normal early brain development and help identify neurodevelopmental disorders. Although many regression models and deep learning methods have been proposed for longitudinal prediction based on incomplete datasets, they have two major drawbacks. First, regression models suffered from the strict requirements of input and output time points, which is less useful in practical scenarios. Second, although existing deep learning methods could predict cortical development at multiple ages, they predicted missing data independently with each available scan, yielding inconsistent predictions for a target time point given multiple inputs, which ignores longitudinal dependencies and introduces ambiguity in practical applications. To this end, we emphasize temporal consistency and develop a novel, flexible framework named longitudinally consistent triplet disentanglement autoencoder to predict an individualized longitudinal cortical developmental trajectory based on each available input by encouraging the similarity among trajectories with a dynamic time-warping loss. Specifically, to achieve individualized prediction, we employ a surfaced-based autoencoder, which decomposes the encoded latent features into identity-related and age-related features with an age estimation task and identity similarity loss as supervisions. These identity-related features are further combined with age conditions in the latent space to generate longitudinal developmental trajectories with the decoder. Experiments on predicting longitudinal infant cortical property maps validate the superior longitudinal consistency and exactness of our results compared to baselines'.