RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Moving Beyond Processing and Analysis-Related Variation in Neuroscience
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.12.01.470790
DO 10.1101/2021.12.01.470790
A1 Xinhui Li
A1 Lei Ai
A1 Steve Giavasis
A1 Hecheng Jin
A1 Eric Feczko
A1 Ting Xu
A1 Jon Clucas
A1 Alexandre Franco
A1 Anibal Sólon Heinsfeld
A1 Azeez Adebimpe
A1 Joshua T. Vogelstein
A1 Chao-Gan Yan
A1 Oscar Esteban
A1 Russell A. Poldrack
A1 Cameron Craddock
A1 Damien Fair
A1 Theodore Satterthwaite
A1 Gregory Kiar
A1 Michael P. Milham
YR 2022
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/09/26/2021.12.01.470790.abstract
AB When fields lack consensus standards and ground truths for their analytic methods, reproducibility can be more of an ideal than a reality. Such has been the case for functional neuroimaging, where there exists a sprawling space of tools for constructing processing pipelines and drawing interpretations. We provide a critical evaluation of the impact of differences across five independently developed minimal preprocessing pipelines for functional MRI. We show that even when handling identical data, inter-pipeline agreement was only moderate. Critically, this highlights a dependence of downstream analyses on the chosen processing pipeline, and sheds light on a potentially driving factor in prior reports of limited reproducibility across studies. Using a densely sampled test-retest dataset, we show that limitations imposed by inter-pipeline agreement mainly become appreciable when the reliability of the underlying data is high, which is increasingly the case as the field progresses into an era of unprecedented data quality and abundance. We highlight the importance of comparing analytic configurations, as both widely discussed (e.g., global signal regression) and commonly overlooked (e.g., MNI template version) decisions were found to lead to marked variation. We provide recommendations for incorporating tool-based variability in functional neuroimaging analyses and a supporting infrastructure.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.