Repeat it without me: Crowdsourcing the T1 mapping common ground via the ISMRM reproducibility challenge

Purpose T-1 mapping is a widely used quantitative MRI technique, but its tissue-specific values remain inconsistent across protocols, sites, and vendors. The ISMRM Reproducible Research and Quantitative MR study groups jointly launched a challenge to assess the reproducibility of a well-established inversion-recovery T-1 mapping technique, using acquisition details from a seminal T-1 mapping paper on a standardized phantom and in human brains. Methods The challenge used the acquisition protocol from Barral et al. (2010). Researchers collected T-1 mapping data on the ISMRM/NIST phantom and/or in human brains. Data submission, pipeline development, and analysis were conducted using open-source platforms. Intersubmission and intrasubmission comparisons were performed. Results Eighteen submissions (39 phantom and 56 human datasets) on scanners by three MRI vendors were collected at 3 T (except one, at 0.35 T). The mean coefficient of variation was 6.1% for intersubmission phantom measurements, and 2.9% for intrasubmission measurements. For humans, the intersubmission/intrasubmission coefficient of variation was 5.9/3.2% in the genu and 16/6.9% in the cortex. An interactive dashboard for data visualization was also eveloped: https://rrsg2020.dashboards.neurolibre.org. Conclusion The T-1 intersubmission variability was twice as high as the intrasubmission variability in both phantoms and human brains, indicating that the acquisition details in the original paper were insufficient to reproduce a quantitative MRI protocol. This study reports the inherent uncertainty in T-1 measures across independent research groups, bringing us one step closer to a practical clinical baseline of T-1 variations in vivo.