An approach to building foundation models for brain image analysis.

Abstract

Existing machine learning methods for brain image analysis are mostly based on supervised training. They require large labeled datasets, which can be costly or impossible to obtain. Moreover, the trained models are useful only for the narrow task defined by the labels. In this work, we developed a new method, based on the concept of foundation models, to overcome these limitations. Our model is an attention-based neural network that is trained using a novel self-supervised approach. Specifically, the model is trained to generate brain images in a patch-wise manner, thereby learning the brain structure. To facilitate learning of image details, we propose a new method that encodes high-frequency information using convolutional kernels with random weights. We trained our model on a pool of 10 public datasets. We then applied the model on five independent datasets to perform segmentation, lesion detection, denoising, and brain age estimation. Results showed that the foundation model achieved competitive or better results on all tasks, while significantly reducing the required amount of labeled training data. Our method enables leveraging large unlabeled neuroimaging datasets to effectively address diverse brain image analysis tasks and reduce the time and cost requirements of acquiring labels.