The Dual Path Multi-Feature Fusion Model combining CNN and Transformer for Age Estimation of Caenorhabditis elegans

The relatively simple genome, short life cycle, and easy observation of Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) make it an excellent model organism for aging research. Age-stage prediction of C. elegans can help to assess the effectiveness of anti-aging interventions, better explore the role of individual differences in the aging process, and thus promote the development of medicine. However, there are still some problems in accurately predicting the age stages of C. elegans. On the one hand, there may be individual differences among C. elegans due to natural variation and environmental factors. On the other hand, nematode data sets are scarce and image information is complex. In this paper, we perform the age prediction task by studying the body contour morphology, biomarkers, and internal organ changes of C. elegans. Specifically, to address the effects of individual differences and datasets, this paper combines the body contour features, protein aggregation features, and pharyngeal terminal bulb features of C. elegans. In addition, considering the complex information of C. elegans images, this paper proposes a hybrid CNN and Transformer feature extraction method (DFCT), which can fully extract the global and local features of the image. A Dual Path Adaptive Feature Fusion Module (DAFM) is used to fuse the features. A series of experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper outperforms other methods in terms of accuracy and precision, especially in dividing 25 age stages into 3 categories, with an accuracy of 85.93%.