Assessing the variability of brain diffusion MRI preprocessing pipelines using a Region-of-Interest analysis

The lack of a standardized preprocessing pipeline is a significant source of variability that might lower the reproducibility of studies, especially across sites and with incomplete description of the preprocessing workflows. We evaluate the downstream impact of variability in preprocessing workflow by quantifying the reproducibility and variability of region-of-interest (ROI) analyses. While many pipelines achieve excellent reproducibility in most ROI, we observed a large variability in performance of preprocessing workflows to the extent that some pipelines are detrimental to the data quality and reproducibility.