Evaluating 35 Methods to Generate Structural Connectomes Using Pairwise Classification
This work addresses the lack of consensus in building structural connectomes for neuroscience research, providing a systematic evaluation that could guide future studies, though it is incremental as it compares existing methods rather than introducing new ones.
The study compared 35 different pipelines for constructing structural brain networks from diffusion MRI to determine their reliability and ability to distinguish individuals, finding that certain combinations of methods improved classification accuracy over standard measures like ICC.
There is no consensus on how to construct structural brain networks from diffusion MRI. How variations in pre-processing steps affect network reliability and its ability to distinguish subjects remains opaque. In this work, we address this issue by comparing 35 structural connectome-building pipelines. We vary diffusion reconstruction models, tractography algorithms and parcellations. Next, we classify structural connectome pairs as either belonging to the same individual or not. Connectome weights and eight topological derivative measures form our feature set. For experiments, we use three test-retest datasets from the Consortium for Reliability and Reproducibility (CoRR) comprised of a total of 105 individuals. We also compare pairwise classification results to a commonly used parametric test-retest measure, Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC).