Reproducibility Assessment of Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy of Pregenual Anterior Cingulate Cortex across Sessions and Vendors via the Cloud Computing Platform CloudBrain-MRS

Given the need to elucidate the mechanisms underlying illnesses and their treatment, as well as the lack of harmonization of acquisition and post-processing protocols among different magnetic resonance system vendors, this work is to determine if metabolite concentrations obtained from different sessions, machine models and even different vendors of 3 T scanners can be highly reproducible and be pooled for diagnostic analysis, which is very valuable for the research of rare diseases. Participants underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning once on two separate days within one week (one session per day, each session including two proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) scans with no more than a 5-minute interval between scans (no off-bed activity)) on each machine. were analyzed for reliability of within- and between- sessions using the coefficient of variation (CV) and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and for reproducibility of across the machines using correlation coefficient. As for within- and between- session, all CV values for a group of all the first or second scans of a session, or for a session were almost below 20%, and most of the ICCs for metabolites range from moderate (0.4-0.59) to excellent (0.75-1), indicating high data reliability. When it comes to the reproducibility across the three scanners, all Pearson correlation coefficients across the three machines approached 1 with most around 0.9, and majority demonstrated statistical significance (P<0.01). Additionally, the intra-vendor reproducibility was greater than the inter-vendor ones.