How Reliable Is Individualized Functional-Network Attribution in Resting-State fMRI Cognitive Prediction in ADNI?
Sheethal Bhat, Mahfuzur Rahman Chowdhury, Imam Ahmed Shaik, Rose Dawn Bharath, Siming Bayer, Andreas Maier
Individualized attribution estimates which functional networks drive a model prediction for a given subject and is often proposed as an interpretable resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) biomarker, but its test-retest reliability is rarely quantified. We evaluate per-subject network-ablation attribution for a frozen resting-state functional connectivity (FC) predictor (Schaefer-200 FC predicting MMSE/ADAS-Cog13) trained on N=875 subjects from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), using, and (iii) a subject-level permutation null. Split-half reliability is near-ceiling (Spearman p=0.948/0.950) but drops on scan-rescan (p=0.609/0.616). Under the mismatched-subject null, correlations remain substantial (p~0.46-0.47), indicating strong population-shared structure, yet matched pairs exceed this null (z~6.6-6.9, p<=10-4). Thus, in ADNI, individualized network attribution contains a modest but non-zero person-specific component atop a strong population-shared pattern. We recommend reporting scan-rescan reliability together with a permutation-null control, rather than within-session proxies alone, to avoid overstating individual specificity.
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