Integrating Multiple Imaging Modalities does not Boost Prediction of Carotid Artery Intima-Media Thickness in Midlife Adults

Background Human neuroimaging evidence suggests that cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk may relate to functional and structural features of the brain. The present study tested whether combining functional and structural (multimodal) brain measures, derived from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), would yield a multivariate brain biomarker that reliably predicts a subclinical marker of CVD risk, carotid-artery intima-media thickness (CA-IMT). Methods Neuroimaging, cardiovascular, and demographic data were assessed in 324 midlife and otherwise healthy adults who were free of (a) clinical CVD and (b) use of medications for chronic illness (aged 30-51 years, 49% female). We implemented a prediction stacking algorithm that combined multimodal brain imaging measures and Framingham Risk Scores (FRS) to predict CA-IMT. We included imaging measures that could be easily obtained in clinical settings: resting state functional connectivity and structural morphology measures from T1-weighted images. Results Our models reliably predicted CA-IMT using FRS, as well as for several individual MRI measures; however, none of the individual MRI measures outperformed FRS. Moreover, stacking functional and structural brain measures with FRS did not boost prediction accuracy above that of FRS alone. Conclusions Combining multimodal functional and structural brain measures through a stacking algorithm does not appear to yield a reliable brain biomarker of subclinical CVD, as reflected by CA-IMT.