Big GABA: Edited MR spectroscopy at 24 research sites

Mark Mikkelsen; Peter B Barker; Pallab K Bhattacharyya; Maiken K Brix; Pieter F Buur; Kim M Cecil; Kimberly L Chan; David Y-T Chen; Alexander R Craven; Koen Cuypers; Michael Dacko; Niall W Duncan; Ulrike Dydak; David A Edmondson; Gabriele Ende; Lars Ersland; Fei Gao; Ian Greenhouse; Ashley D Harris; Naying He; Stefanie Heba; Nigel Hoggard; Tun-Wei Hsu; Jacobus F A Jansen; Alayar Kangarlu; Thomas Lange; R Marc Lebel; Yan Li; Chien-Yuan E Lin; Jy-Kang Liou; Jiing-Feng Lirng; Feng Liu; Ruoyun Ma; Celine Maes; Marta Moreno-Ortega; Scott O Murray; Sean Noah; Ralph Noeske; Michael D Noseworthy; Georg Oeltzschner; James J Prisciandaro; Nicolaas A J Puts; Timothy P L Roberts; Markus Sack; Napapon Sailasuta; Muhammad G Saleh; Michael-Paul Schallmo; Nicholas Simard; Stephan P Swinnen; Martin Tegenthoff; Peter Truong; Guangbin Wang; Iain D Wilkinson; Hans-Jörg Wittsack; Hongmin Xu; Fuhua Yan; Chencheng Zhang; Vadim Zipunnikov; Helge J Zöllner; Richard A E Edden

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.07.021

Big GABA: Edited MR spectroscopy at 24 research sites

Neuroimage. 2017 Oct 1:159:32-45. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.07.021. Epub 2017 Jul 14.

Authors

Mark Mikkelsen¹, Peter B Barker¹, Pallab K Bhattacharyya², Maiken K Brix³, Pieter F Buur⁴, Kim M Cecil⁵, Kimberly L Chan⁶, David Y-T Chen⁷, Alexander R Craven⁸, Koen Cuypers⁹, Michael Dacko¹⁰, Niall W Duncan¹¹, Ulrike Dydak¹², David A Edmondson¹², Gabriele Ende¹³, Lars Ersland¹⁴, Fei Gao¹⁵, Ian Greenhouse¹⁶, Ashley D Harris¹⁷, Naying He¹⁸, Stefanie Heba¹⁹, Nigel Hoggard²⁰, Tun-Wei Hsu²¹, Jacobus F A Jansen²², Alayar Kangarlu²³, Thomas Lange¹⁰, R Marc Lebel²⁴, Yan Li¹⁸, Chien-Yuan E Lin²⁵, Jy-Kang Liou²¹, Jiing-Feng Lirng²¹, Feng Liu²⁶, Ruoyun Ma¹², Celine Maes²⁷, Marta Moreno-Ortega²⁸, Scott O Murray²⁹, Sean Noah¹⁶, Ralph Noeske³⁰, Michael D Noseworthy³¹, Georg Oeltzschner¹, James J Prisciandaro³², Nicolaas A J Puts¹, Timothy P L Roberts³³, Markus Sack¹³, Napapon Sailasuta³⁴, Muhammad G Saleh¹, Michael-Paul Schallmo²⁹, Nicholas Simard³⁵, Stephan P Swinnen³⁶, Martin Tegenthoff¹⁹, Peter Truong³⁷, Guangbin Wang¹⁵, Iain D Wilkinson²⁰, Hans-Jörg Wittsack³⁸, Hongmin Xu¹⁸, Fuhua Yan¹⁸, Chencheng Zhang³⁹, Vadim Zipunnikov⁴⁰, Helge J Zöllner⁴¹, Richard A E Edden⁴²

Affiliations

¹ Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Science, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA; F. M. Kirby Research Center for Functional Brain Imaging, Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA.
² Imaging Institute, Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Cleveland, OH, USA; Radiology, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA.
³ Department of Radiology, Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen, Norway; Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway.
⁴ Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
⁵ Department of Radiology, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, USA.
⁶ Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Science, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA; F. M. Kirby Research Center for Functional Brain Imaging, Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA; Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA.
⁷ Department of Radiology, Taipei Medical University Shuang Ho Hospital, New Taipei City, Taiwan.
⁸ Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway; NORMENT - Norwegian Center for Mental Disorders Research, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway.
⁹ Department of Kinesiology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; REVAL Rehabilitation Research Center, Hasselt University, Diepenbeek, Belgium.
¹⁰ Department of Radiology, Medical Physics, Medical Center - University of Freiburg, Faculty of Medicine, Freiburg, Germany.
¹¹ Brain and Consciousness Research Centre, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan.
¹² School of Health Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.
¹³ Department of Neuroimaging, Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim, Germany.
¹⁴ Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway; NORMENT - Norwegian Center for Mental Disorders Research, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway; Department of Clinical Engineering, Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen, Norway.
¹⁵ Shandong Medical Imaging Research Institute, Shandong University, Jinan, China.
¹⁶ Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA.
¹⁷ Department of Radiology, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada.
¹⁸ Department of Radiology, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China.
¹⁹ Department of Neurology, BG University Hospital Bergmannsheil, Bochum, Germany.
²⁰ Academic Unit of Radiology, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK.
²¹ Department of Radiology, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, National Yang-Ming University School of Medicine, Taipei, Taiwan.
²² Department of Radiology, Maastricht University Medical Center, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
²³ Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA; New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY, USA.
²⁴ GE Healthcare, Calgary, AB, Canada.
²⁵ GE Healthcare, Taipei, Taiwan.
²⁶ New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY, USA.
²⁷ Department of Kinesiology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
²⁸ Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
²⁹ Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.
³⁰ GE Healthcare, Berlin, Germany.
³¹ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada.
³² Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC, USA.
³³ Department of Radiology, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
³⁴ Research Imaging Centre, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, ON, Canada; Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
³⁵ School of Biomedical Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada.
³⁶ Department of Kinesiology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; Leuven Research Institute for Neuroscience & Disease (LIND), KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
³⁷ Research Imaging Centre, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, ON, Canada.
³⁸ Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, Medical Faculty, Heinrich-Heine-University, Duesseldorf, Germany.
³⁹ Department of Functional Neurosurgery, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China.
⁴⁰ Department of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA.
⁴¹ Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, Medical Faculty, Heinrich-Heine-University, Duesseldorf, Germany; Institute of Clinical Neuroscience and Medical Psychology, Medical Faculty, Heinrich-Heine-University, Duesseldorf, Germany.
⁴² Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Science, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA; F. M. Kirby Research Center for Functional Brain Imaging, Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA. Electronic address: [email protected].

Abstract

Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) is the only biomedical imaging method that can noninvasively detect endogenous signals from the neurotransmitter γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) in the human brain. Its increasing popularity has been aided by improvements in scanner hardware and acquisition methodology, as well as by broader access to pulse sequences that can selectively detect GABA, in particular J-difference spectral editing sequences. Nevertheless, implementations of GABA-edited MRS remain diverse across research sites, making comparisons between studies challenging. This large-scale multi-vendor, multi-site study seeks to better understand the factors that impact measurement outcomes of GABA-edited MRS. An international consortium of 24 research sites was formed. Data from 272 healthy adults were acquired on scanners from the three major MRI vendors and analyzed using the Gannet processing pipeline. MRS data were acquired in the medial parietal lobe with standard GABA+ and macromolecule- (MM-) suppressed GABA editing. The coefficient of variation across the entire cohort was 12% for GABA+ measurements and 28% for MM-suppressed GABA measurements. A multilevel analysis revealed that most of the variance (72%) in the GABA+ data was accounted for by differences between participants within-site, while site-level differences accounted for comparatively more variance (20%) than vendor-level differences (8%). For MM-suppressed GABA data, the variance was distributed equally between site- (50%) and participant-level (50%) differences. The findings show that GABA+ measurements exhibit strong agreement when implemented with a standard protocol. There is, however, increased variability for MM-suppressed GABA measurements that is attributed in part to differences in site-to-site data acquisition. This study's protocol establishes a framework for future methodological standardization of GABA-edited MRS, while the results provide valuable benchmarks for the MRS community.

Keywords: Editing; GABA; MEGA-PRESS; MRS; Multi-site study.

Publication types

Multicenter Study
Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Adult
Brain / metabolism*
Datasets as Topic
Female
Humans
Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy / instrumentation
Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy / methods
Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy / standards*
Male
Young Adult
gamma-Aminobutyric Acid / analysis*

Substances

gamma-Aminobutyric Acid

Abstract

Publication types

MeSH terms

Substances

Grants and funding