Kavli Affiliate: Terry Jernigan, Anders Dale
| Authors: Diliana Pecheva, John R Iversen, Clare E Palmer, Richard Watts, Terry L Jernigan, Donald J Hagler and Anders M Dale
| Summary:
Abstract The Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study aims to measure the trajectories of brain, cognitive, and emotional development. Cognitive and behavioural development during late childhood and adolescence have been associated with a myriad of microstructural and morphological alterations across the brain, as measured by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). These associations may be strongly localised or spatially diffuse, therefore, it would be advantageous to analyse multimodal MRI data in concert, and across the whole brain. The ABCD study presents the unique challenge of integrating multimodal data from tens of thousands of scans at multiple timepoints, within a reasonable computation time. To address the need for a multimodal registration and atlas for the ABCD dataset, we present the synthesis of an ABCD atlas using the Fast and Efficient Multimodal Image Normalisation Tool (FEMINisT). The FEMINisT ABCD atlas was generated from baseline and two-year follow up imaging data using an iterative approach to synthesise a cohort-specific atlas from linear and nonlinear deformations of eleven channels of diffusion and structural MRI data. We evaluated the performance of FEMINisT against two widely used methods and show that FEMINisT achieves comparable alignment to current state-of-the-art multimodal registration, at a fraction of the computation time. To validate the use of the ABCD FEMINisT atlas in whole brain, voxelwise analysis, we replicate and expand on previously published region-of-interest analysis between diffusion MRI-derived measures and body mass index (BMI). We also report novel association between BMI and brain morphology derived from the registration deformations. We present the ABCD FEMINisT atlas as a publicly available resource to facilitate whole brain voxelwise analyses for the ABCD study. Competing Interest Statement Dr. Dale reports that he was a Founder of and holds equity in CorTechs Labs, Inc., and serves on its Scientific Advisory Board. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Human Longevity, Inc. He receives funding through research grants from GE Healthcare to UCSD. The terms of these arrangements have been reviewed by and approved by UCSD in accordance with its conflict of interest policies. Dr. Dale also reports that he has memberships with the following research consortia: Alzheimers Disease Genetics Consortium (ADGC); Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics Through Meta Analysis (ENIGMA); Prostate Cancer Association Group to Investigate Cancer Associated Alterations in the Genome (PRACTICAL); Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC). All other authors have no conflicts of interest.