Multimodal MRI prediction of cognitive functioning across the lifespan: separating between-person differences from within-person changes.

Authors

Kseniia Konopkina, Irina Buianova, Farzane Lal Khakpoor, Sunthud Pornprasertmanit, Micaela Chan, Narun Pat

Published in

GeroScience. Aug 04, 2026. Epub Aug 04, 2026.

Abstract

Brain MRI shows promise for predicting cognitive functioning, but its utility depends on its capacity to capture stable between-person differences (e.g., patient stratification), longitudinal within-person changes (e.g., prognosis, treatment monitoring), or both. Using longitudinal data from 450 adults (aged 21-90; up to three waves, five years apart) in the Dallas Lifespan Brain Study, we benchmarked five modalities, task fMRI, functional connectivity (FC), structural MRI (sMRI), diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), and arterial spin labeling (ASL), across 37 phenotypes and their combination. Stacking all MRI modalities into one marker predicted cognitive functioning with the highest accuracy (R² = .51), followed by DWI and FC. Variance decomposition showed MRI markers explained substantial between-person variance (up to 60.3%) but modest within-person changes (up to 17.2%) in cognitive functioning. Commonality analysis revealed most markers, except ASL, overlapped with age-related variance in cognitive functioning. These findings clarify the strengths and limitations of MRI markers for stratifying and monitoring cognitive aging.

PMID:
42550370
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 04 Aug 2026.

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