Structural covariance analysis is a promising and increasingly used structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) analysis method which characterises the co-relations of morphology between brain regions over a group of subjects. However, to our knowledge, little has been investigated in terms of the comparability of results between different data sets of healthy human subjects as well as the reliability of results over different rescan sessions and FreeSurfer versions.Our results show (significant) differences of structural covariance between two data sets of age-and sex-matched healthy human adults. This low comparability is unaltered by site correction, and is most severe when using average cortical thickness as a measure of cortical morphology. The low comparability further extends to significant differences in graph theoretic measures. Similar results of low reliability were found when comparing rescan sessions of the same subjects, and even between different FreeSurfer versions of the same scans. To understand our observations of low reliability, we estimated a measurement error covariance, and we show that it is largest in cortical thickness. On simulated data we further demonstrated that stronger errors cause stronger attenuation of correlations and proportionally decreases reliability, which agrees with associations we observed in the real data.To our knowledge this study is the first highlight the problem of reliability and comparability in structural covariance. Practically, we suggest that (1) combining data from different scanners and sites for structural covariance analysis in a naive manner should be avoided, (2) surface area and volume should be preferred as morphological measures of structural covariance over cortical thickness, and (3) some analysis of robustness of the results should be performed for
<b><i>Introduction:</i></b> Increased efforts in neuroscience try to understand mental disorders as brain disorders. In the present study, we investigate how common a neuroreductionist inclination is among highly educated people. In particular, we shed light on implicit presuppositions of mental disorders little is known about in the public, exemplified here by the case of body integrity dysphoria (BID) that is considered a mental disorder for the first time in ICD-11. <b><i>Methods:</i></b> Identically graphed, simulated data of mind-brain correlations were shown in 3 contexts with presumably different presumptions about causality. 738 highly educated lay people rated plausibility of causality attribution from the brain to mind and from mind to the brain for correlations between brain structural properties and mental phenomena. We contrasted participants’ plausibility ratings of causality in the contexts of commonly perceived brain lesion-induced behavior (aphasia), behavior-induced training effects (piano playing), and a newly described mental disorder (BID). <b><i>Results:</i></b> The findings reveal the expected context-dependent modulation of causality attributions in the contexts of aphasia and piano playing. Furthermore, we observed a significant tendency to more readily attribute causal inference from the brain to mind than vice versa with respect to BID. <b><i>Conclusion:</i></b> In some contexts, exemplified here by aphasia and piano playing, unidirectional causality attributions may be justified. However, with respect to BID, we critically discuss presumably unjustified neuroreductionist inclinations under causal uncertainty. Finally, we emphasize the need for a presupposition-free approach in psychiatry.
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