PREACT

Neuroimaging is an important tool for delivering information about brain processes relevant to psychotherapy research. In our prospective-longitudinal observational psychotherapy cohort (see SP1) we therefore will use a neuroimaging battery at baseline that is focused on different aspects of emotion regulation which we consider to be a key mechanism in psychotherapy. The subproject has three work packages. In the first work package, we will pilot and optimize our neuroimaging battery. It consists of three emotion regulation tasks, spanning the spectrum from automatic to voluntary emotion regulation, resting state-MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) as well as structural MRI. The second work package is to guarantee the proper conduction of the main study by training of data acquisition, performing continuous quality checks of acquired data, and delivering preprocessed and basic first-level data for task base and resting state fMRI. For harmonized preprocessing and analyses, we will use our pipeline HALFpipe. Within the third work package, we will perform data-driven connectomics analyses using resting state fMRI for the prediction of non-response using our newly developed NBS-predict tool. NBS-Predict combines the data-driven construction of sparse networks that can be biologically interpreted and machine learning algorithms for prediction.