Objective: The Accelerator program for Discovery in Brain disorders using Stem cells (ADBS) is a longitudinal study on five cohorts of patients with major psychiatric disorders from genetically high-risk families, their unaffected first-degree relatives, and healthy subjects. We describe the ADBS protocols for acquisition, quality assurance (QA), and quality check (QC) for multimodal magnetic resonance brain imaging studies.
Methods:We describe the acquisition and QC protocols for structural, functional, and diffusion images. For QA, we acquire proton density and functional images on phantoms, along with repeated scans on human volunteer. We describe the analysis of phantom data and test-retest reliability of volumetric and diffusion measures.Results: Analysis of acquired phantom data shows linearity of proton density signal with increasing proton fraction, and an overall stability of various spatial and temporal QA measures. Examination of dice coefficient and statistical analyses of coefficient of variation in test-retest data on the human volunteer showed consistency of volumetric and diffusivity measures at whole-brain, regional, and voxel-level.
Conclusion:The described acquisition and QA-QC procedures can yield consistent and reliable quantitative measures. It is expected that this longitudinal Pravesh Parekh and Gaurav V. Bhalerao should be considered joint first author.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
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