Degenerative adversarial neuroimage nets generating images that mimic disease progression

Abstract

Simulating images representative of neurodegenerative diseases is important for predicting patient outcomes and for validation of computational models of disease progression. This capability is valuable for secondary prevention clinical trials where outcomes and screening criteria involve neuroimaging. Traditional computational methods are limited by imposing a parametric model for atrophy and are extremely resource-demanding. Recent advances in deep learning have yielded data-driven models for longitudinal studies (e.g., face ageing) that are capable of generating synthetic images in real-time. Similar solutions can be used to model trajectories of atrophy in the brain, although new challenges need to be addressed to ensure accurate disease progression modelling. Here we propose Degenerative Adversarial NeuroImage Net (DaniNet)—a new deep learning approach that learns to emulate the effect of …