Extracting biological age from biomedical data via deep learning: too much of a good thing?

Sci Rep. 2018 Mar 26;8(1):5210. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-23534-9.

Abstract

Age-related physiological changes in humans are linearly associated with age. Naturally, linear combinations of physiological measures trained to estimate chronological age have recently emerged as a practical way to quantify aging in the form of biological age. In this work, we used one-week long physical activity records from a 2003-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to compare three increasingly accurate biological age models: the unsupervised Principal Components Analysis (PCA) score, a multivariate linear regression, and a state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural network (CNN). We found that the supervised approaches produce better chronological age estimations at the expense of a loss of the association between the aging acceleration and all-cause mortality. Consequently, we turned to the NHANES death register directly and introduced a novel way to train parametric proportional hazards models suitable for out-of-the-box implementation with any modern machine learning software. As a demonstration, we produced a separate deep CNN for mortality risks prediction that outperformed any of the biological age or a simple linear proportional hazards model. Altogether, our findings demonstrate the emerging potential of combined wearable sensors and deep learning technologies for applications involving continuous health risk monitoring and real-time feedback to patients and care providers.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Age Factors
  • Aged
  • Aged, 80 and over
  • Aging / genetics
  • Aging / physiology*
  • Algorithms
  • Deep Learning
  • Exercise / physiology*
  • Female
  • Follow-Up Studies
  • Humans
  • Machine Learning
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Nutrition Surveys / statistics & numerical data*
  • Principal Component Analysis
  • Software*
  • Young Adult