I am very excited to share our latest work published in @eLife! We combined #MEG, #fMRI and #MRI for #BrainAge prediction & #biomarker development. Each modality added unique information & enhanced brain-behavior mapping! elifesciences.org/articles/54055 Thread👇 
1/ We combined anatomical MRI (surface area, thickness, volume), fMRI-connectivity and MEG (source power, connectivity, alpha-peak, 1/f, latencies) with a stacking approach (1: ridge, 2: random forest). We made sure our model potentially extracts information from missing values.
2/ Is combining multimodal brain data worth the effort for brain age prediction? Compared to anatomical MRI, fMRI and MEG added similar improvements. Combining all modalities yielded to markedly improved prediction performance. MEG and fMRI contributed independent information!
3/ Does improved brain age prediction also lead to enhanced characterization of neurocognitive phenotypes? Indeed, combining multiple modalities led to unique discoveries or increased effect sizes associating the out-of-sample brain age delta with neurocognitive outcomes.
4/ Which aspects of MEG were most important for brain age modeling? We found that linear combinations of source-power across frequency bands explained most of the MEG-specific performance. As stand-alone models, source-level alpha and beta band power were most informative.
5/ Well, but acquiring multiple modalities can be difficult in practice, especially due to missing values. Is it worth the effort? We found that combining MEG, fMRI and MEG was always better than using single modalities, even when some modalities were missing in some cases.
6/ Conclusion: Combining electrophysiology with brain images seems always worth the effort, even when modalities are missing. The most important MEG features were basic spectral power signatures that should be easily accessible with EEG too. No excuses for translational laziness!
7/ We would like to thank @kamentsve and Nelson Trujillo-Barreto for their invaluable and profound feedback on our work. You really made a difference!
8/ A plain language summary and press release can be found here: elifesciences.org/for-the-press/…
sorry for the typo btw. -> MEG, fMRI and MRI ... spam spam bacon eggs spam bacon and spam ...
