Curriculum Learning for Age Estimation from Brain MRI

Age estimation from brain MRI has proved to be considerably helpful in early diagnosis of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. In this study, curriculum learning effect on age estimation models was measured using a brain MRI dataset consisting of normal and anomaly data. Three different strategies were selected and compared using 3D Convolutional Neural Networks as the Deep Learning architecture. The strategies were as follows: (1) model training performed only on normal data, (2) model training performed on the entire dataset, (3) model training performed on normal data first and then further training on the entire dataset as per curriculum learning. The results showed that curriculum learning improved results by 20 % compared to traditional training strategies. These results suggested that in age estimation tasks datasets consisting of anomaly data could also be utilized to improve performance.