Work

SMART: A Flexible, Interpretable, and Scalable Spatio-temporal Brain Atlas from High-Resolution Imaging Data

Year: 2026

Type: preprint

Abstract: We introduce SMART, a framework for learning a flexible, interpretable, and scalable spatio-temporal brain atlas from longitudinal high-resolution 3D medical images. Existing approaches to spatio-temporal atlas construction rely on black-box generative models that lack flexibility, limit interpretability, and struggle to scale to high-dimensional data. SMART addresses these challenges by learning a continuous disease-time atlas that decouples global group-wise disease dynamics from their patient-specific anatomical manifestation. Guided by anatomically inspired priors, SMART models interpretable global trajectories of regional progression along a shared disease timeline through region-specific differential equations. Global trajectories are further personalized to individual anatomies via dense diffeomorphic displacements parameterized by a flexible and scalable multi-scale Neural Cellular Automata. Evaluated on five longitudinal MRI datasets in Alzheimer's disease (ADNI-1/GO/2, OASIS-3, AIBL; > 1,300 subjects), SMART produces anatomically meaningful predictions of disease progression and achieves state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy and improved temporal consistency over adversarial and diffusion baselines. Our approach establishes a new paradigm for flexible, interpretable, and scalable modeling of spatio-temporal change in high-dimensional medical image time-series.

Source: arXiv (Cornell University)

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2606.18753

Authors: Kalkhof, John, Gutman, Boris, d'Angremont, Emile, Alexander, Daniel C., Lorenzi, Marco

Institutions: Amsterdam University Medical Centers, University College London

Language: English

Topic: Medical Image Segmentation Techniques

Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green