Deep learning predicts all-cause mortality from longitudinal total-body DXA imaging.
COMMUNICATIONS MEDICINE 2022;
2:102. [PMID:
35992891 PMCID:
PMC9381587 DOI:
10.1038/s43856-022-00166-9]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/30/2021] [Accepted: 07/28/2022] [Indexed: 12/03/2022] Open
Abstract
Background
Mortality research has identified biomarkers predictive of all-cause mortality risk. Most of these markers, such as body mass index, are predictive cross-sectionally, while for others the longitudinal change has been shown to be predictive, for instance greater-than-average muscle and weight loss in older adults. And while sometimes markers are derived from imaging modalities such as DXA, full scans are rarely used. This study builds on that knowledge and tests two hypotheses to improve all-cause mortality prediction. The first hypothesis is that features derived from raw total-body DXA imaging using deep learning are predictive of all-cause mortality with and without clinical risk factors, meanwhile, the second hypothesis states that sequential total-body DXA scans and recurrent neural network models outperform comparable models using only one observation with and without clinical risk factors.
Methods
Multiple deep neural network architectures were designed to test theses hypotheses. The models were trained and evaluated on data from the 16-year-long Health, Aging, and Body Composition Study including over 15,000 scans from over 3000 older, multi-race male and female adults. This study further used explainable AI techniques to interpret the predictions and evaluate the contribution of different inputs.
Results
The results demonstrate that longitudinal total-body DXA scans are predictive of all-cause mortality and improve performance of traditional mortality prediction models. On a held-out test set, the strongest model achieves an area under the receiver operator characteristic curve of 0.79.
Conclusion
This study demonstrates the efficacy of deep learning for the analysis of DXA medical imaging in a cross-sectional and longitudinal setting. By analyzing the trained deep learning models, this work also sheds light on what constitutes healthy aging in a diverse cohort.
Body composition – the overall proportion of fat, muscle, and bone in one’s body – has been associated with mortality. It is important to better understand the relationship between body composition and mortality as changing body composition is an important goal of many drug and lifestyle interventions. Here, we combine medical images used for body composition measurement directly with information from the medical history of a large number of people to predict mortality. We use machine learning, which relies on mathematical models that extract useful features from images and use these to predict an outcome. Our findings show that combining body composition imaging with traditional mortality risk factors improves the prediction of mortality. This may help clinicians to more accurately predict who is at risk of dying in the future and target these patients with appropriate interventions.
Glaser et al. develop a deep learning system to predict all-cause mortality from total-body DXA scans. Their best predictive model integrates longitudinal body composition data with traditional mortality risk factors.
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