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Record W4406011773 · doi:10.1162/imag_a_00438

Brain morphology normative modelling platform for abnormality and centile estimation: Brain MoNoCle

2025· article· en· W4406011773 on OpenAlex
Bethany Little, Nida Alyas, Alexander Surtees, Gavin P. Winston, John S. Duncan, David A. Cousins, John‐Paul Taylor, Peter N. Taylor, Karoline Leiberg, Yujiang Wang

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueImaging Neuroscience · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldNeuroscience
TopicFunctional Brain Connectivity Studies
Canadian institutionsQueen's University
FundersNIHR Newcastle Biomedical Research CentreNational Institute for Health and Care ResearchEngineering and Physical Sciences Research CouncilUCLH Biomedical Research CentreMedical Research CouncilUniversity College London Hospitals NHS Foundation TrustUK Research and Innovation
KeywordsNormativeCovariateBrain morphometryAbnormalityComputer scienceSample (material)NeuroimagingCohortPsychologyArtificial intelligenceMachine learningMedicineMagnetic resonance imagingNeurosciencePathologyPsychiatryRadiology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Normative models of brain structure estimate the effects of covariates such as age and sex using large samples of healthy controls. These models can then be applied to, for example, smaller clinical cohorts to distinguish disease effects from other covariates. However, these advanced statistical modelling approaches can be difficult to access, and processing large healthy cohorts is computationally demanding. Thus, accessible platforms with pre-trained normative models are needed. We present such a platform for brain morphology analysis as an open-source web applicationhttps://cnnplab.shinyapps.io/BrainMoNoCle/, with six key features: (i) user-friendly web interface, (ii) individual and group outputs, (iii) multi-site analysis, (iv) regional and whole-brain analysis, (v) integration with existing tools, and (vi) featuring multiple morphology metrics. Using a diverse sample of 3,276 healthy controls across 21 sites, we pre-trained normative models on various metrics. We validated the models with a small sample of individuals with bipolar disorder, showing outputs that aligned closely with existing literature only after applying our normative modelling. Using a cohort of people with temporal lobe epilepsy, we showed that individual-level abnormalities were in line with seizure lateralisation. Finally, with the ability to investigate multiple morphology measures in the same framework, we found that biological covariates are better explained in specific morphology measures, and for applications, only some measures are sensitive to the disease process. Our platform offers a comprehensive framework to analyse brain morphology in clinical and research settings. Validations confirm the superiority of normative models and the advantage of investigating a range of brain morphology metrics together.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.007
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.784
Threshold uncertainty score0.840

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.007
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.047
GPT teacher head0.311
Teacher spread0.264 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it