What Is the Test-Retest Reliability of Common Task-Functional MRI Measures? New Empirical Evidence and a Meta-Analysis.
Journal Article (Systematic Review;Journal Article)
Identifying brain biomarkers of disease risk is a growing priority in neuroscience. The ability to identify meaningful biomarkers is limited by measurement reliability; unreliable measures are unsuitable for predicting clinical outcomes. Measuring brain activity using task functional MRI (fMRI) is a major focus of biomarker development; however, the reliability of task fMRI has not been systematically evaluated. We present converging evidence demonstrating poor reliability of task-fMRI measures. First, a meta-analysis of 90 experiments (N = 1,008) revealed poor overall reliability-mean intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) = .397. Second, the test-retest reliabilities of activity in a priori regions of interest across 11 common fMRI tasks collected by the Human Connectome Project (N = 45) and the Dunedin Study (N = 20) were poor (ICCs = .067-.485). Collectively, these findings demonstrate that common task-fMRI measures are not currently suitable for brain biomarker discovery or for individual-differences research. We review how this state of affairs came to be and highlight avenues for improving task-fMRI reliability.
Full Text
Duke Authors
Cited Authors
- Elliott, ML; Knodt, AR; Ireland, D; Morris, ML; Poulton, R; Ramrakha, S; Sison, ML; Moffitt, TE; Caspi, A; Hariri, AR
Published Date
- July 2020
Published In
Volume / Issue
- 31 / 7
Start / End Page
- 792 - 806
PubMed ID
- 32489141
Pubmed Central ID
- PMC7370246
Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)
- 1467-9280
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
- 0956-7976
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
- 10.1177/0956797620916786
Language
- eng