{"doi":"10.1016/j.ynirp.2025.100267","title":"Representative scale-invariant characteristics of male and female brains in magnetic resonance images","abstract":"This paper investigates the link between sex and the human brain from anatomical MRI data, where a primary confound is the size difference between male and female groups. Anatomy is characterized by the 3D scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), where features are salient image regions that are automatically identified and normalized according local size or scale. Experiments use T1-w MRI data of 422 healthy unrelated subjects from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) dataset (211 males, 211 females, 22-36 years of age). We found that brain sex may be predicted via image-to-image feature matching with 91.9% accuracy, that classification is driven largely by weakly-informative features distributed throughout the brain and shared by unique subsets of subjects, and that a pair of features identified in the right and left thalamic regions of 97% of subjects predicts sex with 74% accuracy. Misclassified subjects exhibit features typical of the opposite sex in one or both hemispheres.","journal":"Neuroimage Reports","year":2025,"id":567941,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.7107,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1472101,"name":"Talía Vázquez Romaguera","orcid":"0000-0002-4241-766X","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":284059,"name":"William M. Wells","orcid":"0000-0002-4279-8634","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":63230,"name":"Nikos Makris","orcid":"0000-0003-0425-3315","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1013160,"name":"Matthew Toews","orcid":"0000-0002-7567-4283","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":36,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:56:48.183032Z","pmid":"41050952","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}