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Adebimpe, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Adebimpe, A..

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

XCP-D: A Robust Pipeline for the post-processing of fMRI data

Functional neuroimaging is an essential tool for neuroscience research. Pre-processing pipelines produce standardized, minimally pre-processed data to support a range of potential analyses. However, post-processing is not similarly standardized. While several options for post-processing exist, they tend not to support output from disparate pre-processing pipelines, may have limited documentation, and may not follow BIDS best practices. Here we present XCP-D, which presents a solution to these issues. XCP-D is a collaborative effort between PennLINC at the University of Pennsylvania and the DCAN lab at the University at Minnesota. XCP-D uses an open development model on GitHub and incorporates continuous integration testing; it is distributed as a Docker container or Singularity image. XCP-D generates denoised BOLD images and functional derivatives from resting-state data in either NifTI or CIFTI files, following pre-processing with fMRIPrep, HCP, and ABCD-BIDS pipelines. Even prior to its official release, XCP-D has been downloaded >3,000 times from DockerHub. Together, XCP-D facilitates robust, scalable, and reproducible post-processing of fMRI data.

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Individual Differences in Delay Discounting are Associated with Dorsal Prefrontal Cortex Connectivity in Youth

Delay discounting is a measure of impulsive choice relevant in adolescence as it predicts many real-life outcomes, including substance use disorders, obesity, and academic achievement. However, the functional networks underlying individual differences in delay discounting during youth remain incompletely described. Here we investigate the association between multivariate patterns of functional connectivity and individual differences in impulsive choice in a large sample of youth. A total of 293 youth (9-23 years) completed a delay discounting task and underwent resting-state fMRI at 3T. A connectome-wide analysis using multivariate distance-based matrix regression was used to examine whole-brain relationships between delay discounting and functional connectivity was then performed. These analyses revealed that individual differences in delay discounting were associated with patterns of connectivity emanating from the left dorsal prefrontal cortex, a hub of the default mode network. Delay discounting was associated with greater functional connectivity between the dorsal prefrontal cortex and other parts of the default mode network, and reduced connectivity with regions in the dorsal and ventral attention networks. These results suggest that delay discounting in youth is associated with individual differences in relationships both within the default mode network and between the default mode and networks involved in attentional and cognitive control.

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Intrinsic Activity Develops Along a Sensorimotor-Association Cortical Axis in Youth

Animal studies of neurodevelopmental plasticity have shown that intrinsic brain activity evolves from high amplitude and globally synchronized to suppressed and sparse as plasticity declines and the cortex matures. Leveraging resting-state functional MRI data from 1033 individuals (8-23 years), we reveal that this stereotyped refinement of intrinsic activity occurs during human development and provides evidence for a cortical gradient of neurodevelopmental plasticity during childhood and adolescence. Specifically, we demonstrate that declines in the amplitude of intrinsic activity are initiated heterochronously across regions, coupled to the maturation of a plasticity-restricting structural feature, and temporally staggered along a hierarchical sensorimotor-association axis from ages 8 to 18. Youth from disadvantaged environments exhibit reduced intrinsic activity in regions further up the sensorimotor-association axis, suggestive of a reduced level of plasticity in late-maturing cortices. Our results uncover a hierarchical axis of neurodevelopment and offer insight into the temporal sequence of protracted neurodevelopmental plasticity in humans.

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Curation of BIDS (CuBIDS): a workflow and software package for streamlining reproducible curation of large BIDS datasets

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a specification accompanied by a software ecosystem that was designed to create reproducible and automated workflows for processing neuroimaging data. BIDS Apps flexibly build workflows based on the metadata detected in a dataset. However, even BIDS valid metadata can include incorrect values or omissions that result in inconsistent processing across sessions. Additionally, in large-scale, heterogeneous neuroimaging datasets, hidden variability in metadata is difficult to detect and classify. To address these challenges, we created a Python-based software package titled "Curation of BIDS" (CuBIDS), which provides an intuitive workflow that helps users validate and manage the curation of their neuroimaging datasets. CuBIDS includes a robust implementation of BIDS validation that scales to large samples and incorporates DataLad--a version control software package for data--to ensure reproducibility and provenance tracking throughout the entire curation process. CuBIDS provides tools to help users perform quality control on their images metadata and identify unique combinations of imaging parameters. Users can then execute BIDS Apps on a subset of participants that represent the full range of acquisition parameters that are present, accelerating pipeline testing on large datasets. HIGHLIGHTSO_LICuBIDS is a workflow and software package for curating BIDS data. C_LIO_LICuBIDS summarizes the heterogeneity in a BIDS dataset. C_LIO_LICuBIDS prepares BIDS data for successful preprocessing pipeline runs. C_LIO_LICuBIDS helps users perform metadata-based quality control. C_LI

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Spatially-enhanced clusterwise inference for testing and localizing intermodal correspondence

With the increasing availability of neuroimaging data from multiple modalities--each providing a different lens through which to study brain structure or function--new techniques for comparing, integrating, and interpreting information within and across modalities have emerged. Recent developments include hypothesis tests of associations between neuroimaging modalities, which can be used to determine the statistical significance of intermodal associations either throughout the entire brain or within anatomical subregions or functional networks. While these methods provide a crucial foundation for inference on intermodal relationships, they cannot be used to answer questions about where in the brain these associations are most pronounced. In this paper, we introduce a new method, called CLEAN-R, that can be used both to test intermodal correspondence throughout the brain and also to localize this correspondence. Our method involves first adjusting for the underlying spatial autocorrelation structure within each modality before aggregating information within small clusters to construct a map of enhanced test statistics. Using structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging data from a subsample of children and adolescents from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort, we conduct simulations and data analyses where we illustrate the high statistical power and nominal type I error levels of our method. By constructing an interpretable map of group-level correspondence using spatially-enhanced test statistics, our method offers insights beyond those provided by earlier methods.

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Similarity-Based Multimodal Regression

To better understand complex human phenotypes, large-scale studies have increasingly collected multiple data modalities across domains such as imaging, mobile health, and physical activity. The properties of each data type often differ substantially and require either separate analyses or extensive processing to obtain comparable features for a combined analysis. Multimodal data fusion enables certain analyses on matrix-valued and vector-valued data, but it generally cannot integrate modalities of different dimensions and data structures. For a single data modality, multivariate distance matrix regression provides a distance-based framework for regression accommodating a wide range of data types. However, no distancebased method exists to handle multiple complementary types of data. We propose a novel distance-based regression model, which we refer to as Similarity-based Multimodal Regression (SiMMR), that enables simultaneous regression of multiple modalities through their distance profiles. We demonstrate through simulation, imaging studies, and longitudinal mobile health analyses that our proposed method can detect associations in multimodal data of differing properties and dimensionalities, even with modest sample sizes. We perform experiments to evaluate several different test statistics and provide recommendations for applying our method across a broad range of scenarios.

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Voxel-wise Intermodal Coupling Analysis of Two or More Modalities using Local Covariance Decomposition

When individual subjects are imaged with multiple modalities, biological information is present not only within each modality, but also between modalities - that is, in how modalities covary at the voxel level. Previous studies have shown that local covariance structures between modalities, or intermodal coupling (IMCo), can be summarized for two modalities, and that two-modality IMCo reveals otherwise undiscovered patterns in neurodevelopment and certain diseases. However, previous IMCo methods are based on the slopes of local weighted linear regression lines, which are inherently asymmetric and limited to the two-modality setting. Here, we present a generalization of IMCo estimation which uses local covariance decompositions to define a symmetric, voxel-wise coupling coefficient that is valid for two or more modalities. We use this method to study coupling between cerebral blood flow, amplitude of low frequency fluctuations, and local connectivity in 803 subjects ages 8 through 22. We demonstrate that coupling is spatially heterogeneous, varies with respect to age and sex in neurodevelopment, and reveals patterns that are not present in individual modalities. As availability of multi-modal data continues to increase, principal-component-based IMCo (pIMCo) offers a powerful approach for summarizing relationships between multiple aspects of brain structure and function. An R package for estimating pIMCo is available at: https://github.com/hufengling/pIMCo.

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Moving Beyond Processing and Analysis-Related Variation in Neuroscience

When fields lack consensus standard methods and accessible ground truths, reproducibility can be more of an ideal than a reality. Such has been the case for functional neuroimaging, where there exists a sprawling space of tools and processing pipelines. We provide a critical evaluation of the impact of differences across five independently developed minimal preprocessing pipelines for functional MRI. We show that even when handling identical data, inter-pipeline agreement was only moderate, critically shedding light on a factor that limits cross-study reproducibility. We show that low inter-pipeline agreement mainly becomes appreciable when the reliability of the underlying data is high, which is increasingly the case as the field progresses. Crucially, we show that when inter-pipeline agreement is compromised, so too are the consistency of insights from brainwide association studies. We highlight the importance of comparing analytic configurations, as both widely discussed and commonly overlooked decisions can lead to marked variation.

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Association between Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status and Executive System Activation in Youth

Low socioeconomic status has been shown to have detrimental effects on cognitive performance, including working memory (WM). As executive systems that support WM undergo functional neurodevelopment during adolescence, environmental stressors at both individual and community levels may have a particularly strong impact on cognitive outcomes. Here, we sought to examine how neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) impacts task-related activation of the executive system during adolescence, and to determine whether this effect mediates the relationship between neighborhood SES and WM performance. To address these questions, we studied 1,158 youths (age 8-22) that completed a fractal n-back WM task during fMRI at 3T as part of the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort. We found that higher neighborhood SES was associated with greater activation of the executive system to WM load, including the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, posterior parietal cortex, and precuneus. These associations remained significant when controlling for related factors like parental education and exposure to traumatic events. Furthermore, high dimensional multivariate mediation analysis identified two distinct patterns of brain activity within the executive system that significantly mediated the relationship between neighborhood SES and task performance. Together, these findings underscore the importance of the neighborhood environment in shaping executive system function and WM in youth.

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Linking Individual Differences in Personalized Functional Network Topography to Psychopathology in Youth

The spatial layout of large-scale functional brain networks differs between individuals and is particularly variable in association cortex that has been implicated in a broad range of psychiatric disorders. However, it remains unknown whether this variation in functional topography is related to major dimensions of psychopathology in youth. Capitalizing on a large sample with 27-minutes of high-quality functional MRI data (n=790, ages 8-23 years) and advances in machine learning, we examined associations between functional topography and four correlated dimensions of psychopathology (fear, psychosis, externalizing, anxious-misery) as well as an overall psychopathology factor. We found that functional topography significantly predicted individual differences in dimensions of psychopathology, driven mainly by robust associations between topography and overall psychopathology. Reduced cortical representations of association networks were among the most important features of the model. Our results emphasize the value of considering systematic differences in functional neuroanatomy for personalized diagnostics and therapeutics in psychiatry.

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Developmental coupling of cerebral blood flow and fMRI fluctuations in youth

To support brain development during youth, the brain must balance energy delivery and consumption. Previous studies in adults have demonstrated high coupling between cerebral blood flow and brain function as measured using functional neuroimaging, but how this relationship evolves over adolescence is unknown. To address this gap, we studied a sample of 831 children and adolescents (478 females, ages 8-22) from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort who were scanned at 3T with both arterial spin labeled (ASL) MRI and resting-state functional MRI (fMRI). Local coupling between cerebral blood flow (CBF, from ASL) and the amplitude of low frequency fluctuations (ALFF, from fMRI) was first quantified using locally weighted regressions on the cortical surface. We then used generalized additive models to evaluate how CBF-ALFF coupling was associated with age, sex, and executive function. Enrichment of effects within canonical functional networks was evaluated using spin-based permutation tests. Our analyses revealed tight CBF-ALFF coupling across the brain. Whole-brain CBF-ALFF coupling decreased with age, largely driven by coupling decreases in the inferior frontal cortex, precuneus, visual cortex, and temporoparietal cortex (pfdr <0.05). Females had stronger coupling in the frontoparietal network than males (pfdr <0.05). Better executive function was associated with decreased coupling in the somatomotor network (pfdr <0.05). Overall, we found that CBF-ALFF coupling evolves in development, differs by sex, and is associated with individual differences in executive function. Future studies will investigate relationships between maturational changes in CBF-ALFF coupling and the presence of psychiatric symptoms in youth. SIGNIFICANCEThe functions of the human brain are metabolically expensive and reliant on coupling between cerebral blood flow and neural activity. Previous neuroimaging studies in adults demonstrate tight physiology-function coupling, but how this coupling evolves over development is unknown. Here, we examine the relationship between blood flow as measured by arterial spin labeling and the amplitude of low frequency fluctuations from resting-state magnetic resonance imaging across a large sample of youth. We demonstrate regionally specific changes in coupling over age and show that variations in coupling are related to biological sex and executive function. Our results highlight the importance of CBF-ALFF coupling throughout development; we discuss its potential as a future target for the study of neuropsychiatric diseases.

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Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Community MRI Collection and Utilities

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD), a 10 year longitudinal neuroimaging study of the largest population based and demographically distributed cohort of 9-10 year olds (N=11,877), was designed to overcome reproducibility limitations of prior child mental health studies. Besides the fantastic wealth of research opportunities, the extremely large size of the ABCD data set also creates enormous data storage, processing, and analysis challenges for researchers. To ensure data privacy and safety, researchers are not currently able to share neuroimaging data derivatives through the central repository at the National Data Archive (NDA). However, sharing derived data amongst researchers laterally can powerfully accelerate scientific progress, to ensure the maximum public benefit is derived from the ABCD study. To simultaneously promote collaboration and data safety, we developed the ABCD-BIDS Community Collection (ABCC), which includes both curated processed data and software utilities for further analyses. The ABCC also enables researchers to upload their own custom-processed versions of ABCD data and derivatives for sharing with the research community. This NeuroResource is meant to serve as the companion guide for the ABCC. In section we describe the ABCC. Section II highlights ABCC utilities that help researchers access, share, and analyze ABCD data, while section III provides two exemplar reproducibility analyses using ABCC utilities. We hope that adoption of the ABCCs data-safe, open-science framework will boost access and reproducibility, thus facilitating progress in child and adolescent mental health research.

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Dissociable Multi-scale Patterns of Development in Personalized Brain Networks

The brain is organized into networks at multiple resolutions, or scales, yet studies of functional network development typically focus on a single scale. Here, we derived personalized functional networks across 29 scales in a large sample of youths (n=693, ages 8-23 years) to identify multi-scale patterns of network re-organization related to neurocognitive development. We found that developmental shifts in inter-network coupling systematically adhered to and strengthened a functional hierarchy of cortical organization. Furthermore, we observed that scale-dependent effects were present in lower-order, unimodal networks, but not higher-order, transmodal networks. Finally, we found that network maturation had clear behavioral relevance: the development of coupling in unimodal and transmodal networks dissociably mediated the emergence of executive function. These results delineate maturation of multi-scale brain networks, which varies according to a functional hierarchy and impacts cognitive development.

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Sex Differences in Functional Topography of Association Networks

Prior work has shown that there is substantial interindividual variation in the spatial distribution of functional networks across the cerebral cortex, or functional topography. However, it remains unknown whether there are sex differences in the topography of individualized networks in youth. Here we leveraged an advanced machine learning method (sparsity-regularized nonnegative matrix factorization) to define individualized functional networks in 693 youth (ages 8-23 years) who underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging as part of the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort. Multivariate pattern analysis using support vector machines classified participant sex based on functional topography with 83% accuracy (p<0.0001). Brain regions most effective in classifying participant sex belonged to association networks, including the ventral attention and default mode networks. Mass-univariate analyses using generalized additive models with penalized splines provided convergent results. Comparative analysis using transcriptomic data from the Allen Human Brain Atlas revealed that sex differences in multivariate patterns of functional topography correlated with the expression of genes on the X-chromosome. These results identify normative developmental sex differences in the functional topography of association networks and highlight the role of sex as a biological variable in shaping brain development in youth. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTWe identify normative developmental sex differences in the functional topography of personalized association networks including the ventral attention network and default mode network. Furthermore, chromosomal enrichment analyses revealed that sex differences in multivariate patterns of functional topography were spatially coupled to the expression of X-linked genes as well as astrocytic and excitatory neuronal cell-type signatures. These results highlight the role of sex as a biological variable in shaping functional brain development in youth.

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A Developmental Reduction of the Excitation:Inhibition Ratio in Association Cortex during Adolescence.

Adolescence is hypothesized to be a critical period for the development of association cortex. A reduction of the excitation:inhibition (E:I) ratio is a hallmark of critical period development; however it has been unclear how to assess the development of the E:I ratio using non-invasive neuroimaging techniques. Here, we used pharmacological fMRI with a GABAergic benzodiazepine challenge to empirically generate a model of E:I ratio based on multivariate patterns of functional connectivity. In an independent sample of 879 youth (ages 8-22 years), this model predicted reductions in the E:I ratio during adolescence, which were specific to association cortex and related to psychopathology. These findings support hypothesized shifts in E:I balance of association cortices during a neurodevelopmental critical period in adolescence. TeaserInhibitory maturation of the association cortex reflects an adolescent critical period.

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Mobile Footprinting: Linking Individual Distinctiveness in Mobility Patterns to Mood, Sleep, and Brain Functional Connectivity

Mapping individual differences in behavior is fundamental to personalized neuroscience. Here, we establish that statistical patterns of smartphone-based mobility features represent unique "footprints" that allow individual identification. Critically, mobility footprints exhibit varying levels of person-specific distinctiveness and are associated with individual differences in affective instability, circadian irregularity, and brain functional connectivity. Together, this work suggests that real-world mobility patterns may provide an individual-specific signature linking brain, behavior, and mood.

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Alprazolam modulates persistence energy during emotion processing in first-degree relatives of individuals with schizophrenia: a network control study

Schizophrenia is marked by deficits in facial affect processing associated with abnormalities in GABAergic circuitry, deficits also found in first-degree relatives. Facial affect processing involves a distributed network of brain regions including limbic regions like amygdala and visual processing areas like fusiform cortex. Pharmacological modulation of GABAergic circuitry using benzodiazepines like alprazolam can be useful for studying this facial affect processing network and associated GABAergic abnormalities in schizophrenia. Here, we use pharmacological modulation and computational modeling to study the contribution of GABAergic abnormalities toward emotion processing deficits in schizophrenia. Specifically, we apply principles from network control theory to model persistence energy - the control energy required to maintain brain activation states - during emotion identification and recall tasks, with and without administration of alprazolam, in a sample of first-degree relatives and healthy controls. Here, persistence energy quantifies the magnitude of theoretical external inputs during the task. We find that alprazolam increases persistence energy in relatives but not in controls during threatening face processing, suggesting a compensatory mechanism given the relative absence of behavioral abnormalities in this sample of unaffected relatives. Further, we demonstrate that regions in the fusiform and occipital cortices are important for facilitating state transitions during facial affect processing. Finally, we uncover spatial relationships (i) between regional variation in differential control energy (alprazolam versus placebo) and (ii) both serotonin and dopamine neurotransmitter systems, indicating that alprazolam may exert its effects by altering neuromodulatory systems. Together, these findings reveal differences in emotion-processing circuitry associated with genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia.

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