Just like a master artist carefully divides a canvas to create a masterpiece, accurate parcellation of the brain is crucial for understanding changes in aging and neurodegeneration. Instead of relying on manual parcellation by radiologists, a new computational model called DeepParcellation uses deep learning techniques to quickly and accurately divide brain regions. In a groundbreaking study, the model was trained on a large dataset of 5,035 older East Asian brains and 2,535 Caucasian brains, allowing it to specifically cater to the unique characteristics of older East Asians. By combining memory reduction techniques, such as inception blocks, dilated convolutions, and attention gates, DeepParcellation overcomes the challenge of memory limitations. The results demonstrated that DeepParcellation outperformed existing models for both Caucasians and East Asians, indicating its potential for applications in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. The study identifies specific brain regions where DeepParcellation excels, offering valuable insights into Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative conditions. To learn more about this exciting research and the future possibilities of DeepParcellation, dive into the full article!

Accurate parcellation of cortical regions is crucial for distinguishing morphometric changes in aged brains, particularly in degenerative brain diseases. Normal aging and neurodegeneration precipitate brain structural changes, leading to distinct tissue contrast and shape in people aged >60 years. Manual parcellation by trained radiologists can yield a highly accurate outline of the brain; however, analyzing large datasets is laborious and expensive. Alternatively, newly-developed computational models can quickly and accurately conduct brain parcellation, although thus far only for the brains of Caucasian individuals. To develop a computational model for the brain parcellation of older East Asians, we trained magnetic resonance images of dimensions 256 × 256 × 256 on 5,035 brains of older East Asians (Gwangju Alzheimer’s and Related Dementia) and 2,535 brains of Caucasians. The novel N-way strategy combining three memory reduction techniques inception blocks, dilated convolutions, and attention gates was adopted for our model to overcome the intrinsic memory requirement problem. Our method proved to be compatible with the commonly used parcellation model for Caucasians and showed higher similarity and robust reliability in older aged and East Asian groups. In addition, several brain regions showing the superiority of the parcellation suggest that DeepParcellation has a great potential for applications in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.

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