Movie-fMRI as an acquisition state for functional connectivity-based precision psychiatry (2023)
The field of precision psychiatry aims to use biologically based data from individual subjects to shift the focus from the group to the individual for diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of psychiatric disorders. The type of data used for precision psychiatry can vary, and the use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data has shown promising results. However, this endeavor has been limited by the quality of fMRI data. Specifically, for fMRI data to be clinically useful, measures of functional connectivity (FC) must be reliable across repeated scans and sensitive to individual differences in connectivity. Further, we must be able to collect fMRI scans of sufficient length. Ongoing attempts to address these issues focus on methodological techniques, but acquisition state has been overlooked. fMRI scans for precision psychiatry are almost exclusively collected during resting-state, when participants lay in the scanner and stare at a fixation cross. The rapidly advancing field of movie-fMRI offers important advantages for data quality and quantity: it improves reliability, facilitates the detection of individual differences, and enables the collection of longer scans with better head motion and arousal. These advantages have been demonstrated at the whole-brain level, but it is not clear whether they apply to brain regions specifically important in psychiatry. Hence, we hypothesized that, relative to resting-state, movie-fMRI would improve data quality in three psychiatrically relevant brain regions: the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ), and the right pre-supplementary motor area. To test this hypothesis, we compared three measures of test-retest reliability (Intraclass Correlation Coefficient, Image Intraclass Correlation Coefficient, Discriminability) and one proxy for the sensitivity to individual difference (a test-retest identification algorithm) between movie-watching and resting-state data from the open-source Human Connectome Project data. We also investigated the effect of increasing data amount on these measures. We found that movies were either equal, or superior, to rest across all measures in the three brain regions of interest, with the TPJ showing the most benefit from movies. Overall, our results suggest that movie-fMRI appears to be a good candidate acquisition state to optimize FC quality and quantity for precision psychiatry.
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