RELIEF: a structured multivariate approach for removal of latent inter-scanner effects

Combining data collected from multiple study sites is becoming common and is advantageous to researchers to increase the generalizability and replicability of scientific discoveries. However, at the same time, unwanted inter-scanner biases are commonly observed across neuroimaging data collected from multiple study sites or scanners, rendering difficulties in integrating such data to obtain reliable findings. While several methods for handling such unwanted variations have been proposed, most of them use univariate approaches that could be too simple to capture all sources of scanner-specific variations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multivariate harmonization method, called RELIEF (REmoval of Latent Inter-scanner Effects through Factorization) for estimating and removing both explicit and latent scanner effects. Our method is the first approach to introduce the simultaneous dimension reduction and factorization of interlinked matrices to a data harmonization context, which provides a new direction in methodological research for correcting inter-scanner biases. Analyzing diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data from the Social Processes Initiative in Neurobiology of the Schizophrenia (SPINS) study and conducting extensive simulation studies, we show that RELIEF outperforms existing harmonization methods in mitigating inter-scanner biases and retaining biological associations of interest to increase statistical power. RELIEF is publicly available as an R package.