Multimodal MRI prediction of cognitive functioning across the lifespan: separating between-person differences from within-person changes.
Authors
Affiliations (4)
Affiliations (4)
- Department of Psychology, University of Otago, William James Building, 275 Leith Walk, Dunedin, 9016, New Zealand. [email protected].
- Department of Psychology, University of Otago, William James Building, 275 Leith Walk, Dunedin, 9016, New Zealand.
- Faculty of Psychology, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.
- Center for Vital Longevity, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA.
Abstract
Brain MRI shows promise for predicting cognitive functioning, but its utility depends on its capacity to capture stable between-person differences (e.g., patient stratification), longitudinal within-person changes (e.g., prognosis, treatment monitoring), or both. Using longitudinal data from 450 adults (aged 21-90; up to three waves, five years apart) in the Dallas Lifespan Brain Study, we benchmarked five modalities, task fMRI, functional connectivity (FC), structural MRI (sMRI), diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), and arterial spin labeling (ASL), across 37 phenotypes and their combination. Stacking all MRI modalities into one marker predicted cognitive functioning with the highest accuracy (R<sup>2</sup> = .51), followed by DWI and FC. Variance decomposition showed MRI markers explained substantial between-person variance (up to 60.3%) but modest within-person changes (up to 17.2%) in cognitive functioning. Commonality analysis revealed most markers, except ASL, overlapped with age-related variance in cognitive functioning. These findings clarify the strengths and limitations of MRI markers for stratifying and monitoring cognitive aging.