Development and Validation of a Brain Aging Biomarker in Middle-Aged and Older Adults: Deep Learning Approach

BVGN offers a precise framework for brain aging assessment, demonstrates strong generalization on an external large-scale dataset, and proposes novel interpretability strategies to elucidate multiregional cooperative aging patterns. The brain age gap derived from BVGN is validated as a sensitive biomarker for early identification of MCI and predicting cognitive decline, offering substantial potential for clinical applications.