Human Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging Studies for Psychiatric Disorders: The Current Progress and Future Directions

With the prevalence of psychiatric disorders and the limitations of the diagnostic scheme and treatment options of these disorders, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies play a significant role in uncovering the pathological basis of psychiatric disorders and potentially using biological markers in clinical settings. The use of MRI in clinical research has grown over the past three decades, and current MRI research continues to provide an avenue to guide the development of diagnostic approaches and therapeutic solutions. However, the current shortcomings of MRI studies derive not only from technical limitations (i.e., the range of contrasts that MRI probes or sensors can create) but also from confounding factors in the current methodological approaches of case-control studies for psychiatric disorders. Thus, by reviewing the recent literature on MRI research on psychiatric disorders, we explain the current progress and limitations of brain MRI methodologies used to study psychiatric disorders. We consider the growing use of cross-disorder methods to identify shared and disease-specific pathological features across psychiatric disorders. In addition, we need to outline healthy developmental and aging changes of the brain and investigate the disorder difference as a deviation of the trajectory. Although these methods have provided us with new insights, the demarcation between psychiatric disorders based on a definitive set of pathologies remains limited. This challenge of disease stratification is further complicated by the presence of multiple different sets of disorder pathologies within a single disorder and the different progressive timelines of different disorders. As such, we introduce the ongoing research projects in Japan, namely, the Brain Mapping by Integrated Neurotechnologies for Disease Studies (Brain/MINDS) and the Strategic International Brain Science Research Promotion Program (Brain/MINDS Beyond). These collaborative research initiatives across Japan use neuroimaging and travel-subject harmonization to conduct nationwide MRI studies capable of providing large-scale coherent results, which may address the current limitations of MRI psychiatric disorder research.