Evaluating the replicability, specificity, and generalizability of connectome fingerprints

•Replicability, specificity, and generalizability of connectome fingerprinting were assessed.•High accuracies could be replicated in the 900 subjects release of the Human Connectome Project.•Lower accuracies were observed for connectomes derived from more standard data quality.•Specificity of connectivity fingerprinting was low irrespective of data quality.•Accuracy and specificity are projected to drop considerably as the size of a data set increases.

Establishing reliable, robust, and unique brain signatures from neuroimaging data is a prerequisite for precision psychiatry, and therefore a highly sought-after goal in contemporary neuroscience. Recently, the procedure of connectome fingerprinting, using brain functional connectivity profiles as such signatures, was shown to be able to accurately identify individuals from a group of 126 subjects from the Human Connectome Project (HCP). However, the specificity and generalizability of this procedure were not tested. In this replication study, we show both for the original and an extended HCP data set (n = 900 subjects), as well as for an additional data set of more commonly acquired imaging quality (n = 84) that (i) although the high accuracy can be replicated for the larger HCP 900 data set, accuracy is (ii) lower for standard neuroimaging data, and, that (iii) connectome fingerprinting may not be specific enough to distinguish between individuals. In addition, both accuracy and specificity are projected to drop considerably as the size of a data set increases. Although the moderate-to-high accuracies do suggest there is a portion of unique variance, our results suggest that connectomes may actually be quite similar across individuals. This outcome may be relevant to how precision psychiatry could benefit from inferences based on functional connectomes.