Evaluation of neuroCombat and deep learning harmonization for multi-site magnetic resonance neuroimaging in youth with prenatal alcohol exposure

Chloe Scholten; Elyssa M. McMaster; Adam M. Saunders; Michael E. Kim; Gaurav Rudravaram; Elias Levy; Bryce Geeraert; Lianrui Zuo; Simon Vandekar; Catherine Lebel; Bennett A. Landman

arXiv · 2604.00251

Evaluation of neuroCombat and deep learning harmonization for multi-site magnetic resonance neuroimaging in youth with prenatal alcohol exposure

Chloe Scholten·Elyssa M. McMaster·Adam M. Saunders·Michael E. Kim·Gaurav Rudravaram·Elias Levy·Bryce Geeraert·Lianrui Zuo·Simon Vandekar·Catherine Lebel·Bennett A. Landman

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

In cases of prevalent diseases and disorders, such as Prenatal Alcohol Exposure (PAE), multi-site data collection allows for increased study samples. However, multi-site studies introduce additional variability through heterogeneous collection materials, such as scanner and acquisition protocols, which confound with biologically relevant signals. Neuroscientists often utilize statistical methods on image-derived metrics, such as volume of regions of interest, after all image processing to minimize site-related variance. HACA3, a deep learning harmonization method, offers an opportunity to harmonize image signals prior to metric quantification; however, HACA3 has not yet been validated in a pediatric cohort. In this work, we investigate HACA3's ability to remove site-related variance and preserve biologically relevant signal compared to a statistical method, neuroCombat, and pair HACA3 processing with neuroCombat to evaluate the efficacy of multiple harmonization methods in a pediatric (age 7 to 21) population across three unique scanners with controls and cases of PAE with downstream MaCRUISE volume metrics. We find that HACA3 qualitatively improves inter-site contrast variations, but statistical methods reduce greater site-related variance within the MaCRUISE volume metrics following an ANCOVA test, and HACA3 relies on follow-up statistical methods to approach maximal biological preservation in this context.

Explore related subjects

eess.IV q-bio.QM

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Chloe Scholten, Elyssa M. McMaster, Adam M. Saunders, Michael E. Kim, Gaurav Rudravaram, Elias Levy, Bryce Geeraert, Lianrui Zuo, Simon Vandekar, Catherine Lebel, Bennett A. Landman. 2026-03-31. Evaluation of neuroCombat and deep learning harmonization for multi-site magnetic resonance neuroimaging in youth with prenatal alcohol exposure. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00251

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Exponential Pixelating Integral transform with dual fractal features for enhanced chest X-ray abnormality detection

The heightened prevalence of respiratory disorders, particularly exacerbated by a significant upswing in fatalities due to the novel coronavirus, underscores the critical need for early detection and timely intervention. This imperative is paramount, possessing the potential to profoundly impact and safeguard numerous lives. Medically, chest radiography stands out as an essential and economically viable medical imaging approach for diagnosing and assessing the severity of diverse Respiratory Disorders. However, their detection in Chest X-Rays is a cumbersome task even for well-trained radiologists owing to low contrast issues, overlapping of the tissue structures, subjective variability, and the presence of noise. To address these issues, a novel analytical model termed Exponential Pixelating Integral is introduced for the automatic detection of infections in Chest X-Rays in this work. Initially, the presented Exponential Pixelating Integral enhances the pixel intensities to overcome the low-contrast issues that are then polar-transformed followed by their representation using the locally invariant Mandelbrot and Julia fractal geometries for effective distinction of structural features. The collated features labeled Exponential Pixelating Integral with dually characterized fractal features are then classified by the non-parametric multivariate adaptive regression splines to establish an ensemble model between each pair of classes for effective diagnosis of diverse diseases. Rigorous analysis of the proposed classification framework on large medical benchmarked datasets showcases its superiority over its peers by registering a higher classification accuracy and F1 scores ranging from 98.46 to 99.45% and 96.53-98.10% respectively, making it a precise and interpretable automated system for diagnosing respiratory disorders.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2026

Myocardial Strain Drift Correction in Deep Learning Based Ultrasound Tracking

Myocardial strain from echocardiography is a key biomarker for cardiac function. Recent deep learning methods show strong performance for myocardial motion tracking but often lack physiological constraints, leading to temporal drift across the cardiac cycle. Consequently, tracked points may not return to their relative initial positions at the end of each cardiac cycle, producing inaccurate strain estimates and even divergence in some cases. We propose a deep learning framework that compensates for drift during myocardial tracking. We extend a state-of-the-art echocardiographic tracking method (TAS-Net) with persistent memory tokens that share information across sliding windows over full cardiac cycles. A teacher-student fine-tuning strategy on real echocardiographic data then enforces physiologically consistent cyclic motion while preserving tracking accuracy. Experiments show reduced global and regional strain drift, improved agreement with clinical references, and better test-retest reproducibility, supporting more reliable myocardial strain estimation in clinical practice.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2026

Morphological Decoupling-Based Skeletal Classification for Clinical Assessment of Malocclusion

Malocclusion skeletal grading is a fundamental task in orthodontics, critical for diagnosis and treatment planning. Traditionally, cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) is used for visual measurement, and the reconstructed lateral cephalograms are handed over to expert dentists for diagnosis. However, manual review is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and subject to inter-operator variability. Therefore, an automatic CBCT-based system is needed for reliable malocclusion skeletal grading. In this case, we develop TeethGNN, a novel graph-based framework designed to combine CBCT image features with morphological information for accurate and efficient malocclusion grading. TeethGNN utilizes a decoupled learnable decoder to directly predict key morphological indicators from CBCT images, eliminating the need for manual measurements. These morphological features are then fused with image features using a graph neural network (GNN), which effectively models the relationships between the modalities. To further enhance robustness and calibration, we introduce a collaborative calibration strategy. This strategy combines multi-scale graph adversarial perturbation for explicit calibration and nonlinear topological graph calibration for implicit confidence adjustment. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on our collected clinical dataset demonstrate that our malocclusion measurement system achieves 77.08\% in accuracy and 89.61\% in AUC, outperforming the compared state-of-the-art methods. These results validate the effectiveness of graph-based multimodal fusion and collaborative calibration in improving malocclusion grading performance. Our system shows strong potential for advancing computer-aided orthodontic diagnosis, providing an accurate and reliable solution for vision-based clinical measurement and diagnosis.

eess.IV↗