Accurate estimation of biological age and its application in disease prediction using a multimodal image Transformer system

• Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 121; no. 3; p. e2308812120
• Main Authors: Wang, Jinzhuo, Gao, Yuanxu, Wang, Fangfei, Zeng, Simiao, Li, Jiahui, Miao, Hanpei, Wang, Taorui, Zeng, Jin, Baptista-Hon, Daniel, Monteiro, Olivia, Guan, Taihua, Cheng, Linling, Lu, Yuxing, Luo, Zhengchao, Li, Ming, Zhu, Jian-Kang, Nie, Sheng, Zhang, Kang, Zhou, Yong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States National Academy of Sciences 16-01-2024
• Subjects: Age determination; Aging; Biological Sciences; Biomarkers; Chronic illnesses; Heterogeneity; Medical imaging; Predictions; Retina; Retinal images; Tongue; multimodal fusion; chronic disease diagnosis and prognosis; transformer with cross-attention; biological age prediction; biomarker discovery
• ISSN: 0027-8424; 1091-6490; 1091-6490
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2308812120

Aging in an individual refers to the temporal change, mostly decline, in the body's ability to meet physiological demands. Biological age (BA) is a biomarker of chronological aging and can be used to stratify populations to predict certain age-related chronic diseases. BA can be predicted from biomedical features such as brain MRI, retinal, or facial images, but the inherent heterogeneity in the aging process limits the usefulness of BA predicted from individual body systems. In this paper, we developed a multimodal Transformer-based architecture with cross-attention which was able to combine facial, tongue, and retinal images to estimate BA. We trained our model using facial, tongue, and retinal images from 11,223 healthy subjects and demonstrated that using a fusion of the three image modalities achieved the most accurate BA predictions. We validated our approach on a test population of 2,840 individuals with six chronic diseases and obtained significant difference between chronological age and BA (AgeDiff) than that of healthy subjects. We showed that AgeDiff has the potential to be utilized as a standalone biomarker or conjunctively alongside other known factors for risk stratification and progression prediction of chronic diseases. Our results therefore highlight the feasibility of using multimodal images to estimate and interrogate the aging process.