Batch Effects In Brain Foundation Model Embeddings

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Tao, Ye, Baker, Bradley T., Wu, Yu, Sarwate, Anand D., Panta, Sandeep, Plis, Sergey, Calhoun, Vince D.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Tao, Ye
Baker, Bradley T.
Wu, Yu
Sarwate, Anand D.
Panta, Sandeep
Plis, Sergey
Calhoun, Vince D.
author_facet Tao, Ye
Baker, Bradley T.
Wu, Yu
Sarwate, Anand D.
Panta, Sandeep
Plis, Sergey
Calhoun, Vince D.
contents Foundation models show strong potential for large-scale, high-dimensional biomedical applications, yet their ability to capture relevant neurobiological characteristics remains underexplored. We systematically evaluate embeddings from two neuroimaging foundation models, BrainLM and SwiFT, across multi-site fMRI datasets using a comprehensive evaluation framework. Our results show that foundation model embeddings encode substantial batch-related variability, often dominating diagnosis-related information across heterogeneous datasets. We further investigate how harmonization, applied to reduce batch effects, influences these embeddings. In addition, we find that BrainLM prefers to capture fine-grained regional activity, whereas SwiFT tends to represent interactions between regions, consistent with their respective model architectures. Our study highlights the importance of accounting for batch effects in foundation models and motivates future work on disentangling biologically meaningful signals from acquisition-related variability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_14441
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Batch Effects In Brain Foundation Model Embeddings
Tao, Ye
Baker, Bradley T.
Wu, Yu
Sarwate, Anand D.
Panta, Sandeep
Plis, Sergey
Calhoun, Vince D.
Signal Processing
Foundation models show strong potential for large-scale, high-dimensional biomedical applications, yet their ability to capture relevant neurobiological characteristics remains underexplored. We systematically evaluate embeddings from two neuroimaging foundation models, BrainLM and SwiFT, across multi-site fMRI datasets using a comprehensive evaluation framework. Our results show that foundation model embeddings encode substantial batch-related variability, often dominating diagnosis-related information across heterogeneous datasets. We further investigate how harmonization, applied to reduce batch effects, influences these embeddings. In addition, we find that BrainLM prefers to capture fine-grained regional activity, whereas SwiFT tends to represent interactions between regions, consistent with their respective model architectures. Our study highlights the importance of accounting for batch effects in foundation models and motivates future work on disentangling biologically meaningful signals from acquisition-related variability.
title Batch Effects In Brain Foundation Model Embeddings
topic Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14441