Assessment of organ-specific biological age based on whole-body MR data from the German National Cohort Study. Phase II: Correlation with epidemiological, functional and clinical data

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Age is an important risk factor for a number of different medical disorders and plays an important role in clinical decision-making. The concept of biological age (in contrast to chronological age) aims to capture interindividual differences in the ageing process and provides a measure for age-related changes in individuals. However, biological age is hard to quantify due to lack of a clear definition and due to overlapping concepts of biological age. For example, age-related changes can be organ-specific so that biological age can refer to specific organ systems. Morphological data provided by medical imaging can contribute to a better understanding of this ageing process, also with respect to specific organ systems. The NAKO study offers a unique dataset of about 30,000 whole-body imaging examinations together with epidemiological, functional and clinical information of participants. In the ongoing Phase I of this project our group was able to establish and validate machine learning methods for image-based organ-specific analysis of the ageing process based on the first 11,000 imaging data sets of the NAKO study. Our goals in this project extension proposal are the extension of these established methods to the now available 30,000 NAKO datasets, the extension of the analysis to further organ systems and the joint analysis of imaging and non-imaging data aiming to derive a comprehensive characterization of the phenotypic ageing process and to understand its determinant factors. In addition, we aim to implement automated quality analysis of the image-based analysis process in order to ensure validity of results and enable robust clinical translation of the methodology.