The study of associations between an individual's age and imaging and non-imaging data is an active research area that attempts to aid understanding of the effects and patterns of aging. In this work we have conducted a supervoxel-wise association study between both volumetric and tissue density features in coronary computed tomography angiograms and the chronological age of a subject, to understand the localized changes in morphology and tissue density with age. To enable a supervoxel-wise study of volume and tissue density, we developed a novel method based on image segmentation, inter-subject image registration, and robust supervoxel-based correlation analysis, to achieve a statistical association study between the images and age. We evaluate the registration methodology in terms of the Dice coefficient for the heart chambers and myocardium, and the inverse consistency of the transformations, showing that the method works well in most cases with high overlap and inverse consistency. In a sex-stratified study conducted on a subset of $n=1388$ images from the SCAPIS study, the supervoxel-wise analysis was able to find localized associations with age outside of the commonly segmented and analyzed sub-regions, and several substantial differences between the sexes in the association of age and volume.

翻译：个体年龄与影像及非影像数据之间的关联研究是一个活跃的研究领域，旨在帮助理解衰老的效应与模式。本研究对冠状动脉CT血管造影中的容积特征与组织密度特征，与受试者的实际年龄进行了超体素层面的关联分析，以理解年龄增长导致的局部形态学与组织密度变化。为实现容积与组织密度的超体素研究，我们开发了一种基于图像分割、跨被试图像配准及鲁棒的超体素相关分析的新方法，以完成影像与年龄的统计关联研究。我们通过心腔与心肌的Dice系数以及变换的逆一致性来评估配准方法，结果表明该方法在多数情况下表现良好，具有较高的重叠度与逆一致性。在基于SCAPIS研究中$n=1388$张图像子集进行的性别分层研究中，超体素分析能够发现超出常规分割与分析子区域之外的、与年龄的局部关联，并揭示了年龄与容积关联中若干显著的性别差异。