Person-Based Brain Morphometric Similarity is Heritable and Correlates With Biological Features

Abstract

The characterization of the functional significance of interindividual variation in brain morphometry is a core aim of cognitive neuroscience. Prior research has focused on interindividual variation at the level of regional brain measures thus overlooking the fact that each individual brain is a person-specific ensemble of interdependent regions. To expand this line of inquiry we introduce the person-based similarity index (PBSI) for brain morphometry. The conceptual unit of the PBSI is the individual person’s brain structural profile which considers all relevant morphometric measures as features of a single vector. In 2 independent cohorts (total of 1756 healthy participants), we demonstrate the foundational validity of this approach by affirming that the PBSI scores for subcortical volume and cortical thickness in healthy individuals differ between men and women, are heritable, and robust to variation in neuroimaging parameters, sample composition, and regional brain morphometry. Moreover, the PBSI scores correlate with age, body mass index, and fluid intelligence. Collectively, these results suggest that the person-based measures of brain morphometry are biologically and functionally meaningful and have the potential to advance the study of human variation in multivariate brain imaging phenotypes in healthy and clinical populations.

Three major dimensions of human brain cortical ageing in relation to cognitive decline across the eighth decade of life

“…However, it has become increasingly apparent that univariate accounts of brain ageing (considering a single brain area in isolation) are suboptimal for accurately characterising patterns of brain ageing. More recent accounts of brain organisation have used cross-sectional data to identify clusters of regions with shared morphometric characteristics [12][13][14][15][16]. Whereas such accounts have the potential to capture the coordinated patterns of age-related atrophy in health and disease, they are predominantly based on crosssectional data, which, as noted above, cannot fully reflect the dynamics of within-individual change [17].…”

An Early Stage Researcher's Primer on Systems Medicine Terminology

“…Recently, some papers have been published that demonstrate the validity of this technique. 298 , 299 …”

Interaction of Sleep and Cortical Structural Maintenance From an Individual Person Microlongitudinal Perspective and Implications for Precision Medicine Research

“…Thus, on one hand, they arguably generalize to other individuals to some presently unknown extent. In addition, however, individuals clearly differ and are individual specific in terms of thickness and other properties of cortical structure (Mueller et al, 2013;Zilles and Amunts, 2013;Wachinger et al, 2015;Henssen et al, 2016;de Manzano and Ullen, 2018;Kruggel, 2018;Valizadeh et al, 2018;Doucet et al, 2019) and in terms of duration and other aspects of sleep (Van Dongen et al, 2005;Lewandowski et al, 2013;Saletin et al, 2013;Rusterholz et al, 2017;Chaput et al, 2018). This suggests that different expressions of the above concepts and/or different concepts apply in other individuals.…”