Psychiatric neuroimaging designs for individualised, cohort, and population studies

Abstract

Psychiatric neuroimaging faces challenges to rigour and reproducibility that prompt reconsideration of the relative strengths and limitations of study designs. Owing to high resource demands and varying inferential goals, current designs differentially emphasise sample size, measurement breadth, and longitudinal assessments. In this overview and perspective, we provide a guide to the current landscape of psychiatric neuroimaging study designs with respect to this balance of scientific goals and resource constraints. Through a heuristic data cube contrasting key design features, we discuss a resulting trade-off among small sample, precision longitudinal studies (e.g., individualised studies and cohorts) and large sample, minimally longitudinal, population studies. Precision studies support tests of within-person mechanisms, via intervention and tracking of longitudinal course. Population studies support tests of generalisation across multifaceted individual differences. A proposed reciprocal validation model (RVM) aims to recursively leverage these complementary designs in sequence to accumulate evidence, optimise relative strengths, and build towards improved long-term clinical utility.