{"title":"Solving the Pervasive Problem of Protocol Non-Compliance in MRI using an Open-Source tool mrQA.","authors":"Harsh Sinha, Pradeep Reddy Raamana","doi":"10.1007/s12021-024-09668-4","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Pooling data across diverse sources acquired by multisite consortia requires compliance with a predefined reference protocol i.e., ensuring different sites and scanners for a given project have used identical or compatible MR physics parameter values. Traditionally, this has been an arduous and manual process due to difficulties in working with the complicated DICOM standard and lack of resources allocated towards protocol compliance. Moreover, issues of protocol compliance is often overlooked for lack of realization that parameter values are routinely improvised/modified locally at various sites. The inconsistencies in acquisition protocols can reduce SNR, statistical power, and in the worst case, may invalidate the results altogether. An open-source tool, mrQA was developed to automatically assess protocol compliance on standard dataset formats such as DICOM and BIDS, and to study the patterns of non-compliance in over 20 open neuroimaging datasets, including the large ABCD study. The results demonstrate that the lack of compliance is rather pervasive. The frequent sources of non-compliance include but are not limited to deviations in Repetition Time, Echo Time, Flip Angle, and Phase Encoding Direction. It was also observed that GE and Philips scanners exhibited higher rates of non-compliance relative to the Siemens scanners in the ABCD dataset. Continuous monitoring for protocol compliance is strongly recommended before any pre/post-processing, ideally right after the acquisition, to avoid the silent propagation of severe/subtle issues. Although, this study focuses on neuroimaging datasets, the proposed tool mrQA can work with any DICOM-based datasets.</p>","PeriodicalId":49761,"journal":{"name":"Neuroinformatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.7000,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11329586/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Neuroinformatics","FirstCategoryId":"3","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12021-024-09668-4","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2024/6/11 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"COMPUTER SCIENCE, INTERDISCIPLINARY APPLICATIONS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Pooling data across diverse sources acquired by multisite consortia requires compliance with a predefined reference protocol i.e., ensuring different sites and scanners for a given project have used identical or compatible MR physics parameter values. Traditionally, this has been an arduous and manual process due to difficulties in working with the complicated DICOM standard and lack of resources allocated towards protocol compliance. Moreover, issues of protocol compliance is often overlooked for lack of realization that parameter values are routinely improvised/modified locally at various sites. The inconsistencies in acquisition protocols can reduce SNR, statistical power, and in the worst case, may invalidate the results altogether. An open-source tool, mrQA was developed to automatically assess protocol compliance on standard dataset formats such as DICOM and BIDS, and to study the patterns of non-compliance in over 20 open neuroimaging datasets, including the large ABCD study. The results demonstrate that the lack of compliance is rather pervasive. The frequent sources of non-compliance include but are not limited to deviations in Repetition Time, Echo Time, Flip Angle, and Phase Encoding Direction. It was also observed that GE and Philips scanners exhibited higher rates of non-compliance relative to the Siemens scanners in the ABCD dataset. Continuous monitoring for protocol compliance is strongly recommended before any pre/post-processing, ideally right after the acquisition, to avoid the silent propagation of severe/subtle issues. Although, this study focuses on neuroimaging datasets, the proposed tool mrQA can work with any DICOM-based datasets.
期刊介绍:
Neuroinformatics publishes original articles and reviews with an emphasis on data structure and software tools related to analysis, modeling, integration, and sharing in all areas of neuroscience research. The editors particularly invite contributions on: (1) Theory and methodology, including discussions on ontologies, modeling approaches, database design, and meta-analyses; (2) Descriptions of developed databases and software tools, and of the methods for their distribution; (3) Relevant experimental results, such as reports accompanie by the release of massive data sets; (4) Computational simulations of models integrating and organizing complex data; and (5) Neuroengineering approaches, including hardware, robotics, and information theory studies.