Prediction of fluid intelligence from T1-w MRI images: A precise two-step deep learning framework.

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Neurocognitive Prediction Challenge (ABCD-NP-Challenge) is a community-driven competition that challenges competitors to develop algorithms to predict fluid intelligence scores from T1-w MRI images. In this work, a two-step deep learning pipeline is proposed to improve the prediction accuracy of fluid intelligence scores. In terms of the first step, the main contributions of this study include the following: (1) the concepts of the residual network (ResNet) and the squeeze-and-excitation network (SENet) are utilized to improve the original 3D U-Net; (2) in the segmentation process, the pixels in symmetrical brain regions are assigned the same label; (3) to remove redundant background information from the segmented regions of interest (ROIs), a minimum bounding cube (MBC) is used to enclose the ROIs. This new segmentation structure can greatly improve the segmentation performance of the ROIs in the brain as compared with the classical convolutional neural network (CNN), which yields a Dice coefficient of 0.8920. In the second stage, MBCs are used to train neural network regression models for enhanced nonlinearity. The fluid intelligence score prediction results of the proposed method are found to be superior to those of current state-of-the-art approaches, and the proposed method achieves a mean square error (MSE) of 82.56 on a test data set, which reflects a very competitive performance.