Multimodal MRI marker of cognition explains the association between cognition and mental health in the UK Biobank.

Abstract

Cognitive dysfunction often co-occurs with psychopathology. Advances in neuroimaging and machine learning have led to neural indicators that predict individual differences in cognition with reasonable performance. We examined whether these indicators explain the relationship between cognition and mental health in the UK Biobank (<i>n</i>>14,000). Using machine learning, we quantified the covariation between cognition and 133 mental health indices and derived neural indicators of cognition from 72 neuroimaging phenotypes across diffusion-weighted MRI (dwMRI), resting-state functional MRI (rsMRI), and structural MRI (sMRI). With commonality analyses, we investigated how much of the cognition-mental health covariation is captured by each indicator and neural indicators combined within and across MRI modalities. The predictive association between mental health and cognition was at <i>r</i>=0.3. Neuroimaging captured 2.1 to 25.8% of the cognition-mental health covariation. Combining phenotypes within modalities improved the explanation to 25.5% for dwMRI, 29.8% for rsMRI, and 31.6% for sMRI, and combining them across modalities enhanced the explanation to 48%. We present an integrated approach to derive multimodal MRI markers of cognition that can be transdiagnostically linked to psychopathology, demonstrating that the predictive ability of neural indicators extends beyond the prediction of cognition itself, enabling us to capture cognition-mental health covariation.