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Session: Brain
Session starts: Friday 27 January, 14:00
Presentation starts: 14:45
Room: Room 558

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Jesper Pilmeyer (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Rolf Lamerichs (Philips Research)
Marcel Breeuwer (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Sveta Zinger (Eindhoven University of Technology)

Abstract:
Objective prognosis of major depressive disorder (MDD) based on functional MRI (fMRI) biomarkers remains problematic due an abundance of physiological and motion confounders and susceptibility artifacts in deeper located subcortical and inferior anterior regions. Increased amygdala activity during negative emotional face-matching tasks is often reported in patients with MDD. Yet, studies predicting longitudinal symptom improvement in MDD are scarce. Multiband multi-echo acquisitions improve the BOLD sensitivity, reduce signal losses in regions prone to susceptibility artifacts and allow for improved spatial or temporal resolution. In this work we acquired fMRI scans of an emotion-related task with the aim of predicting 3- months and 6-months MDD symptom improvement. Thirty-two MDD patients underwent MRI examination at baseline, including a T1-weighted and a multiband multi-echo fMRI acquisition. During the fMRI scan, patients performed the Hariri task, a well-validated emotional facematching paradigm that includes blocks of rest, shapes and sad or angry faces. The Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS) was obtained at baseline, 3-months and 6-months follow-up to assess depression severity. Patients with a HDRS_follow-up ≤ 50% compared to HDRS_baseline were classified as responder, whereas the others were labelled as non-responder. Temporal signal-to-noise ratio (tSNR) and t-values were calculated for several multi-echo combinations and single-echo (echo 2) to compare data quality and face-related activation contrast, respectively. Binary classification between response groups was performed using polynomial support vector machine classifiers and validated by leave-one-out cross validation. The features were activation contrasts of faces-rest and faces-shapes in both amygdalae and hippocampi. The tSNR was the highest for multi-echo combinations in all regions-of-interest. The majority of subjects showed contrast enhancement of minimally 10-20% for multi-echo combinations compared to single-echo. Furthermore, multi-echo based features predicted 3-months response with 91% accuracy. The 6-months response could be predicted with 87% accuracy by singleecho derived features. Based on a multiband multi-echo sequence, we showed overall improvement in signal quality and emotion-related activation contrast in the amygdala and hippocampus compared to singleecho. 3-months and 6-months response in MDD could be predicted with high accuracy based on these features. This demonstrates the potential of multiband multi-echo fMRI for prognosis in psychiatric disorders.