Cross-vendor reliability of functional and structural brain connectivity in a travelling cohort.

Overview

1. Ruhr University Bochum, BG University Hospital Bergmannsheil, Department of Neurology,Bochum, Germany
2. Department of Information Technology, FH Dortmund, University of Applied Sciences and Arts,Dortmund, Germany
3. Ruhr University Bochum, St. Josef Hospital, University Hospital of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine,Bochum, Germany

Abstract

Scanner-related bias is a major challenge in multi-centre neuroimaging studies. This study assesses cross-vendor reliability of functional and structural brain connectivity (FC, SC) and evaluates the effect of neuroComBat harmonisation. A travelling cohort (n = 10) of healthy participants was scanned on a Siemens Prisma 3T and a Philips Achieva 3.0T system within one week. Reliability metrics of FC (Pearson’s r) and SC (based on iFOD2 & SIFT2) were calculated for each edge before and after neuroComBat harmonisation. At the subject-level, reliability was poor for FC (ICC: 0.22 ± 0.23, wsCV: 62 ± 14%, unharmonised) and fair for SC (ICC: 0.43 ± 0.32, wsCV: 28 ± 15%, unharmonised). At the group-level, Bland-Altman analyses showed minimal systematic bias between scanners in both modalities, but with wide limits of agreement. Pattern similarity was 0.63 (FC) and 0.98 (SC). G Theory analyses showed the scanner accounted for 11.8% (FC) and 7.9% (SC) of the variance. After harmonisation, subject-level reliability only improved marginally, but scanner-dependent variability dropped to 0.8% and 1.1% in FC and SC, respectively. Overall, reliability was higher for SC than FC mirroring their differential temporal stability, for group-averaged than subject-level data, and for full-connectome organisation than for individual edges. NeuroComBat worked as designed, successfully mitigating scanner-dependent variance at the group but not the subject level.

Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-026-47705-1.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Data availability

Data and code used in this study are publicly available at (10.5281/zenodo.18769049).

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Version 1, 29 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 5 authors, 9 keywords, 11 MeSH terms, 1 funder, 38 references.

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This paper

Butry, L., Thomä, J., Forsting, J., Enax-Krumova, E. K., & Schlaffke, L. (2026). Cross-vendor reliability of functional and structural brain connectivity in a travelling cohort. Scientific reports, 16(1), 12071. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-47705-1

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