Emerson Award: Neuroimaging Association Studies of Psychological Phenotypes: Current Challenges and Future Directions

Many aspects of mental health research and care have yet to realize substantive advances from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), despite wide-spread and increasing use of MRI and functional MRI (fMRI) in translational neuroscience. A primary challenge to such translational insights has been replicating cross-sectional associations between inter-individual differences in brain structure or function and complex cognitive or mental health phenotypes. New large-scale initiatives that collect neuroimaging data from thousands of individuals are accelerating discovery and facilitating robust examinations of challenges and opportunities for translational neuroimaging. This talk will present findings exploring how neuroimaging association studies of psychological phenotypes most often require significantly larger sample sizes than have historically been used (e.g., N ≥ 1,000 vs. N < 100) as well as new analytic methods (e.g., multivariate prediction) to ensure robust and reproducible results. Additional discussion will focus on new precision longitudinal neuroimaging designs that may offer a complementary means to further improve reproducibility and integrate neuroimaging markers into broader clinical research designs.