Advances in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have contributed greatly to the study of neurodegenerative processes, psychiatric disorders, and normal human development, but the effect of such improvements on the reliability of downstream morphometric measures has not been extensively studied. We examined how MRI-derived neurostructural measures are affected by three technological advancements: parallel acceleration, increased spatial resolution, and the use of a high bandwidth multiecho sequence. Test-retest data were collected from 11 healthy participants during 2 imaging sessions occurring approximately 2 weeks apart. We acquired 4 T1-weighted MP-RAGE sequences during each session: a non-accelerated anisotropic sequence (MPR), a non-accelerated isotropic sequence (ISO), an accelerated isotropic sequence (ISH), and an accelerated isotropic high bandwidth multiecho sequence (MEM). Cortical thickness and volumetric measures were computed for each sequence to assess test-retest reliability and measurement bias. Reliability was extremely high for most measures and similar across imaging parameters. Significant measurement bias was observed, however, between MPR and all isotropic sequences for all cortical regions and some subcortical structures. These results suggest that these improvements in MRI acquisition technology do not compromise data reproducibility, but that consistency should be maintained in choosing imaging parameters for structural MRI studies.

Oscillatory brain rhythms and evoked responses are widely believed to impact cognition, but relatively little is known about how these measures are affected by healthy aging. The present study used MEG to examine age-related changes in spontaneous oscillations and tactile evoked responses in primary somatosensory cortex (SI) in healthy young (YA) and middle-aged (MA) adults. To make specific predictions about neurophysiological changes that mediate age-related MEG changes, we applied a biophysically realistic model of SI that accurately reproduces SI MEG mu rhythms, containing alpha (7-14Hz) and beta (15-30Hz) components, and evoked responses. Analyses of MEG data revealed a significant increase in prestimulus mu power in SI, driven predominately by greater mu-beta dominance, and a larger and delayed M70 peak in the SI evoked response in MA. Previous analysis with our computational model showed that the SI mu rhythm could be reproduced with a stochastic sequence of rhythmic ∼10Hz feedforward (FF) input to the granular layers of SI (representative of lemniscal thalamic input) followed nearly simultaneously by ∼10Hz feedback (FB) input to the supragranular layers (representative of input from high order cortical or non-specific thalamic sources) (Jones et al., 2009). In the present study, the model further predicted that the rhythmic FF and FB inputs become stronger with age. Further, the FB input is predicted to arrive more synchronously to SI on each cycle of the 10Hz input in MA. The simulated neurophysiological changes are sufficient to account for the age-related differences in both prestimulus mu rhythms and evoked responses. Thus, the model predicts that a single set of neurophysiological changes intimately links these age-related changes in neural dynamics.