Advancing the search for biomarkers using ultra-high field MRI
19th January 2022
Hasan Sbaihat, Ravichandran Rajkumar, Shukti Ramkiran, Abed Al-Nasser Assi, Jörg Felder, N. Jon Shah, Tanja Veselinovi and Irene Neuner
The ability to diagnose psychiatric conditions with greater precision and reliability is highly desirable, leading to improved treatment planning across a range of mental health conditions. Previous research has indicated that the individual properties of brain networks at rest may be a possible source for biomarkers that could be used to indicate dysfunction or imbalances in the brain. However, for biomarkers to be practicable, they must be reproducible.
This research aims to advance the search for potential biomarkers by using ultra-high field MRI (UHF MRI) to investigate the stability of four functional MRI resting-state (RS) parameters. The parameters were specifically selected to examine the activity and connectivity of three established RS networks that have been previously shown to play an important role in several psychiatric diseases. By using UHF MRI, the quality of the scan data acquired is considerably improved, providing results that are more reliable and thus more reproducible than results from standard field strength MRI.
Based on the publicly available data set obtained from the Gorgolewski project, the study found high levels of stability in three of the parameters investigated and a moderate level of stability in the fourth. Furthermore, the internetwork connectivity between each network pair was found to be moderately to strongly stable.
The high degree of reliability and reproducibility in capturing the properties of the three major RS networks by means of UHF-MRI points to its applicability as a potentially useful tool in the search for disease-relevant biomarkers. Since this work successfully demonstrated reliability and reproducibility using UHF MRI, future research will now focus on comparing the levels of stability in brain networks for different psychiatric diseases and healthy subjects.
Origional publication: Test–retest stability of spontaneous brain activity and functional connectivity in the core resting-state networks assessed with ultra-high field 7-Tesla resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging