A Methodological Checklist for fMRI Drug Cue Reactivity Studies: Development and Expert Consensus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Cue reactivity is one of the most frequently used paradigms in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of substance use disorders (SUDs). While there have been promising results elucidating the neurocognitive mechanisms of SUDs and SUD treatments, the interpretability and reproducibility of these studies is limited by incomplete reporting of participant characteristics, task design, craving assessment, scanning preparation and analysis decisions in fMRI drug cue reactivity (FDCR) experiments. This hampers clinical translation, not least because systematic review and meta-analysis of published work is difficult. This consensus paper and Delphi study aims to outline the important methodological aspects of FDCR research, present structured recommendations for more comprehensive methods reporting, and review the FDCR literature to assess the reporting of items that are deemed important. Methods Fifty-five FDCR scientists from around the world participated in this study. First, an initial checklist of items deemed important in FDCR studies was developed by several members of the Enhanced NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta-Analyses (ENIGMA) Addiction working group based on a systematic review. Using a modified Delphi consensus method, all experts were asked to comment on, revise or add items to the initial checklist, and then to rate the importance of each item in subsequent rounds. The reporting status of items in the final checklist was investigated in 108 recently published FDCR studies identified through a systematic review. Results By the final round, 38 items reached the consensus threshold and were classified under 7 major categories: “Participant Characteristics”, “General fMRI Information”, “General Task Information”, “Cue Information”, “Craving Assessment Inside Scanner”, “Craving Assessment Outside Scanner” and “Pre- and Post- Scanning Considerations”. The review of the 108 FDCR papers revealed significant gaps in the reporting of the items considered important by the experts. For instance, while items in the “general fMRI reporting” category were reported in 90.5% of the reviewed papers, items in the “pre- and post-scanning considerations” category were reported by only 44.7% of reviewed FDCR studies. Conclusion Considering the notable and sometimes unexpected gaps in the reporting of items deemed to be important by experts in any FDCR study, the protocols could benefit from the adoption of reporting standards. This checklist, a living document to be updated as the field and its methods advance, can help improve experimental design, reporting, and the widespread understanding of the FDCR protocols. This checklist can also provide a sample for developing consensus statements for protocols in other areas of task-based fMRI.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.108 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".