Personality neuroscience aims to discover links between personality traits and features of the brain. Previous neuroimaging studies have investigated the connection between the brain structure, microstructural properties of brain tissue, or the functional connectivity (FC) and these personality traits. Analyses relating personality to diffusion-weighted MRI measures were limited to investigating the voxel-wise or tract-wise association of microstructural properties with trait scores. The main goal of our study was to determine whether there is an individual predictive relationship between the structural connectome (SC) and the big five personality traits. To that end, we expanded past work in two ways: First, by focusing on the entire structural connectome (SC) instead of separate voxels and tracts; and second, by predicting personality trait scores instead of performing a statistical correlation analysis to assess an out-of-sample performance. Prediction of personality from the SC is, however, not yet as established as prediction of behavior from the FC, and sparse studies in this field so far delivered rather heterogeneous results. We, therefore, further dedicated our study to investigate whether and how different pipeline settings influence prediction performance. In a sample of 426 unrelated subjects with high-quality MRI acquisitions from the Human Connectome Project, we analyzed 19 different brain parcellations, 3 SC weightings, 3 groups of subjects, and 4 feature classes for the prediction of the 5 personality traits using a ridge regression. From the large number of evaluated pipelines, only very few lead to promising results of prediction accuracy r > 0.2, while the vast majority lead to a small prediction accuracy centered around zero. A markedly better prediction was observed for a cognition target confirming the chosen methods for SC calculation and prediction and indicating limitations of the personality trait scores and their relation to the SC. We therefore report that, for methods evaluated here, the SC cannot predict personality trait scores. Overall, we found that all considered pipeline conditions influence the predictive performance of both cognition and personality trait scores. The strongest differences were found for the trait openness and the SC weighting by number of streamlines which outperformed the other traits and weightings, respectively. As there is a substantial variation in prediction accuracy across pipelines even for the same subjects and the same target, these findings highlight the crucial importance of pipeline settings for predicting individual traits from the SC.

Functional neuroimaging is an essential tool for neuroscience research. Pre-processing pipelines produce standardized, minimally pre-processed data to support a range of potential analyses. However, post-processing is not similarly standardized. While several options for post-processing exist, they may not support output from different pre-processing pipelines, may have limited documentation, and may not follow generally accepted data organization standards (e.g., Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS)). In response, we present XCP-D: a collaborative effort between PennLINC at the University of Pennsylvania and the DCAN lab at the University of Minnesota. XCP-D uses an open development model on GitHub and incorporates continuous integration testing; it is distributed as a Docker container or Apptainer image. XCP-D generates denoised BOLD images and functional derivatives from resting-state data in either NIfTI or CIFTI files following pre-processing with fMRIPrep, HCP, or ABCD-BIDS pipelines. Even prior to its official release, XCP-D has been downloaded >5,000 times from DockerHub. Together, XCP-D facilitates robust, scalable, and reproducible post-processing of fMRI data.

Neuroimaging research faces a crisis of reproducibility. With massive sample sizes and greater data complexity, this problem becomes more acute. Software that operates on imaging data defined using the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS)—the BIDS App—has provided a substantial advance. However, even using BIDS Apps, a full audit trail of data processing is a necessary prerequisite for fully reproducible research. Obtaining a faithful record of the audit trail is challenging—especially for large datasets. Recently, the FAIRly big framework was introduced as a way to facilitate reproducible processing of large-scale data by leveraging DataLad—a version control system for data management. However, the current implementation of this framework was more of a proof of concept, and could not be immediately reused by other investigators for different use cases. Here, we introduce the B IDS A pp B oot s trap (BABS), a user-friendly and generalizable Python package for reproducible image processing at scale. BABS facilitates the reproducible application of BIDS Apps to large-scale datasets. Leveraging DataLad and the FAIRly big framework, BABS tracks the full audit trail of data processing in a scalable way by automatically preparing all scripts necessary for data processing and version tracking on high performance computing (HPC) systems. Currently, BABS supports jobs submissions and audits on Sun Grid Engine (SGE) and Slurm HPCs with a parsimonious set of programs. To demonstrate its scalability, we applied BABS to data from the Healthy Brain Network (HBN; n = 2,565). Taken together, BABS allows reproducible and scalable image processing and is broadly extensible via an open-source development model.