Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Berlin Institute of Health, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy CCM, Berlin, Germany.
Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Berlin Institute of Health, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy CCM, Berlin, Germany.
Neuroimage. 2017 Sep;158:371-377. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.07.016. Epub 2017 Jul 11.
Establishing reliable, robust, and unique brain signatures from neuroimaging data is a prerequisite for precision psychiatry, and therefore a highly sought-after goal in contemporary neuroscience. Recently, the procedure of connectome fingerprinting, using brain functional connectivity profiles as such signatures, was shown to be able to accurately identify individuals from a group of 126 subjects from the Human Connectome Project (HCP). However, the specificity and generalizability of this procedure were not tested. In this replication study, we show both for the original and an extended HCP data set (n = 900 subjects), as well as for an additional data set of more commonly acquired imaging quality (n = 84) that (i) although the high accuracy can be replicated for the larger HCP 900 data set, accuracy is (ii) lower for standard neuroimaging data, and, that (iii) connectome fingerprinting may not be specific enough to distinguish between individuals. In addition, both accuracy and specificity are projected to drop considerably as the size of a data set increases. Although the moderate-to-high accuracies do suggest there is a portion of unique variance, our results suggest that connectomes may actually be quite similar across individuals. This outcome may be relevant to how precision psychiatry could benefit from inferences based on functional connectomes.
从神经影像学数据中建立可靠、稳健且独特的大脑特征是精准精神病学的前提，因此也是当代神经科学的一个高度追求的目标。最近，使用大脑功能连接图谱作为此类特征的连接组指纹识别程序被证明能够从人类连接组计划（HCP）的 126 名受试者群体中准确识别个体。然而，该程序的特异性和通用性尚未经过测试。在这项复制研究中，我们展示了（i）对于原始和扩展的 HCP 数据集（n=900 名受试者），以及（ii）对于更常见采集的成像质量的附加数据集（n=84 名受试者），该程序的特异性和通用性都不足够高，无法区分个体，尽管在更大的 HCP 900 数据集上可以复制高精度，但（iii）准确性较低。此外，随着数据集的增加，准确性和特异性都预计会大幅下降。尽管中等至高的准确性确实表明存在一部分独特的方差，但我们的结果表明，连接组实际上在个体之间可能非常相似。这一结果可能与精准精神病学如何从功能连接组推断中受益有关。
