Mapping Individual Differences in Intermodal Coupling in Neurodevelopment

Within-individual coupling between measures of brain structure and function evolves in development and may underlie differential risk for neuropsychiatric disorders. Despite increasing interest in the development of structure-function relationships, rigorous methods to quantify and test individual differences in coupling remain nascent. In this article, we explore and address gaps in approaches for testing and spatially localizing individual differences in intermodal coupling, including a new method, called CEIDR. CEIDR controls false positives in individual differences in intermodal correlations that arise from mean and variance heterogeneity and improves statistical power by adopting adaptive cluster enhancement. Through a comparison across different approaches to testing individual differences in intermodal coupling, we delineate subtle differences in the hypotheses they test, which may ultimately lead researchers to arrive at different results. Finally, we illustrate these differences in two applications to brain development using data from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort.