Multivariate consistency of resting-state fMRI connectivity maps acquired on a single individual over 2.5 years, 13 sites and 3 vendors

Abstract

Studies using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) are increasingly collecting data at multiple sites in order to speed up recruitment or increase sample size. The main objective of this study was to assess the long-term consistency of rsfMRI connectivity maps derived at multiple sites and vendors using the Canadian Dementia Imaging Protocol (CDIP, www.cdip-pcid.ca). Nine to ten minutes of functional BOLD images were acquired from an adult cognitively healthy volunteer scanned repeatedly at 13 Canadian sites on three scanner makes (General Electric, Philips and Siemens) over the course of 2.5 years. The consistency (spatial Pearsons correlation) of rsfMRI connectivity maps for seven canonical networks ranged from about 0.4-0.8 (intra-site) to 0.3-0.8 (inter-vendor), with a negligible effect of time. We noted systematic differences in data quality across vendors, which may also explain some of these results. We also pooled the long-term longitudinal data with a single-site, short-term (1 month) data sample acquired on 26 subjects (10 scans per subject), called HNU1. Using randomly selected pairs of scans from each subject, we quantified the ability of a data-driven unsupervised cluster analysis to match two scans of the same subjects. In this \"fingerprinting\" experiment, we found that scans from the Canadian subject (Csub) could be matched with high accuracy intra-site (>95% for some networks), but that the accuracy decreased substantially for scans drawn from different sites and vendors, while still remaining in the range of accuracies observed in HNU1. Overall, our results demonstrate good multivariate stability of rsfMRI measures over several years, but substantial impact of scanning site and vendors. How detrimental these effects are will depend on the application, yet improving methods for harmonizing multisite analysis is an important area for future work.\n\nHIGHLIGHTSO_LIConsistency of rsfMRI connectivity over 2.5 years, 13 sites and 3 scanner vendors\nC_LIO_LITime elapsed between scans had negligible effect on consistency\nC_LIO_LIConsistency decreased due to site and vendor differences\nC_LIO_LIAccuracy of connectivity fingerprints decreased due to site and vendor differences\nC_LI\n\n\n\nO_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=181 HEIGHT=200 SRC=\"FIGDIR/small/497743v2_ufig1.gif\" ALT=\"Figure 1\">\nView larger version (54K):\norg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@109bab7org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1c1720corg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@12678e2org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@ca494d_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG Graphical Abstract\n\nC_FIG