Assessing quantitative MRI techniques using multimodal comparisons

Francis Carter, Alfred Anwander, Mathieu Johnson, Thomás Goucha, Helyne Adamson, Angela D Friederici, Antoine Lutti, Claudine J Gauthier, Nikolaus Weiskopf, Pierre-Louis Bazin and Christopher J Steele

PLOS ONE, 2025, vol. 20, issue 7, 1-18

Abstract: The study of brain structure and change in neuroscience is commonly conducted using macroscopic morphological measures of the brain such as regional volume or cortical thickness, providing little insight into the microstructure and physiology of the brain. In contrast, quantitative Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) allows the monitoring of microscopic brain change non-invasively in-vivo, and provides directly comparable values between tissues, regions, and individuals. To support the development and common use of qMRI for cognitive neuroscience, we analysed a set of qMRI and dMRI metrics (R1, R2*, Magnetization Transfer saturation, Proton Density saturation, Fractional Anisotropy, Mean Diffusivity) in 101 healthy young adults. Here we provide a comprehensive descriptive analysis of these metrics and their linear relationships to each other in grey and white matter to develop a more complete understanding of the relationship to tissue microstructure. Furthermore, we provide evidence that combinations of metrics may uncover informative gradients across the brain by showing that lower variance components of PCA may be used to identify cortical gradients otherwise hidden within individual metrics. We discuss these results within the context of microstructural and physiological neuroscience research.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0327828 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 27828&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0327828

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0327828

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().