Transfer Learning for Task Adaptation of Brain Lesion Assessment and Prediction of Brain Abnormalities Progression/Regression using Irregularity Age Map in Brain MRI

The Irregularity Age Map (IAM) for the unsupervised assessment of brain white matter hyperintensities (WMH) opens several opportunities in machine learning-based brain MRI analysis, including transfer task adaptation learning in the MRI brain lesion’s segmentation and prediction of lesion progression and regression. The lack of need for manual labels is useful for transfer learning. Whereas, the nature of IAM itself can be exploited for predicting lesion progression/regression. In this study, we propose the use of task adaptation transfer learning for WMH segmentation using CNN through weakly-training UNet and UResNet using the output from IAM and the use of IAM for predicting patterns of WMH progression and regression.