Quality over quantity: powering neuroimaging samples in psychiatry

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychiatry
• Medical Imaging

Background:

• Neuroimaging is extensively used in psychiatric research for understanding mental health.
• Despite advanced tools, its translational impact in psychiatry remains limited.
• Concerns exist regarding underpowered psychiatric neuroimaging studies due to small sample sizes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To shift focus from increasing sample size to enhancing study design quality in psychiatric neuroimaging.
• To propose strategies for boosting research power without necessarily expanding sample size.
• To improve the translational potential of neuroimaging findings in mental health.

Main Methods:

• Reviewing and proposing improvements at various stages of study design, data modeling, and analysis.
• Suggesting methods for leveraging multiple datasets to enhance findings' reliability.
• Emphasizing the enhancement of brain-based and clinical measure quality.

Main Results:

• Optimizing experimental designs can increase the power of psychiatric neuroimaging studies.
• Leveraging multiple datasets can strengthen the generalizability of findings.
• Improving the quality of measures is key to achieving translational associations.

Conclusions:

• Thoughtful study design and data quality improvements are crucial for psychiatric neuroimaging.
• Enhanced methodological rigor can lead to meaningful clinical associations with modest sample sizes.
• This approach promises to increase the translational impact of neuroimaging in psychiatry.