Highly replicable multisite patterns of adolescent white matter maturation.

More sensitive and robust microstructural measures from diffusion MRI reveal adolescent white matter development across 62 brain bundles in over 24,000 datasets.

• Why it matters: Understanding adolescent brain maturation at scale is hindered by variability across imaging environments, limiting reproducibility and generalizability of findings.
• What they did: The study analyzed a large, curated collection of processed diffusion MRI data from the ABCD study, focusing on advanced microstructural metrics like NODDI, DKI, and MAP-MRI, and applied longitudinal harmonization techniques.
• The result: Measures such as intracellular volume fraction, mean kurtosis, and return-to-origin probability proved more sensitive to development and more robust to image quality variation, enabling more reproducible research on adolescent white matter maturation.