In the last two decades, neuroimaging techniques have become essential tools for both basic research and clinical studies of the human brain. However, there is currently a lack of reference standards to accurately quantify individual differences in neuroimaging metrics across the human lifespan.
Normative values are a common tool in psychology and medicine to assess individual risk and aid in diagnosis at the level of a single individual. However, even experienced neuroimagers may struggle to define the normal range of hippocampal volume for an individual of a specific sex and age. As a result, inferences about abnormalities in brain structure and function are typically based on case-control designs. Unfortunately, control samples are often insufficiently diverse or too small to account for normative variation, making it challenging to draw accurate conclusions.
The ENIGMA Lifespan Working Group has recently made significant strides in addressing aforementioned knowledge gaps related to brain morphometry. Their development of a tool (https://centilebrain.org/) that enables the measurement of brain deviations using an international reference (>37,000 study participants aged 3-90 years, from more than 80 research sites) represents a significant advancement in the field. The article is now published as an open-access paper in The Lancet Digital Health, and it is highlighted by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.
This new endeavor by the ENIGMA Lifespan Working group has many practical advantages.
A practical way for anyone, worldwide, to compute brain deviation scores for their own research participants.
The CentileBrain.org web portal is a user-friendly web interface that require minimal computational infrastructure and skills promoting international, inclusive use of these advanced computational models.
In-depth benchmarking of the algorithms
Extensive sensitivity analyses
Publicly available pre-trained models and codes
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