When Brains Disagree: Biological Ambiguity Underlies the Challenge of Amyloid PET Synthesis from Structural MRI

TL;DR

This study investigates the intrinsic biological ambiguity in MRI-to-amyloid PET synthesis for Alzheimer's, demonstrating that ambiguity limits performance and can be mitigated by incorporating plasma biomarkers.

Contribution

It provides controlled experiments confirming that biological ambiguity constrains synthesis performance and shows that multimodal data integration improves stability and accuracy.

Findings

Performance drops when data ambiguity is introduced.

Biologically unambiguous mappings are learnable in isolation.

Adding plasma biomarkers improves synthesis stability.

Abstract

Structural MRI-to-amyloid PET synthesis has been proposed as a non-invasive alternative for amyloid assessment in Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, reported performance of identical models varies widely across studies, and increasingly complex architectures have not led to consistent gains. This inconsistency is thought to be caused by a fundamental biological ambiguity: MRI captures neurodegeneration, while PET measures amyloid pathology - two processes that are often temporally decoupled in AD. As a result, similar MRI patterns may correspond to different amyloid states, creating ambiguous one-to-many mappings. MRI-to-amyloid PET synthesis may therefore be intrinsically ill-posed; however, this idea has yet to be tested scientifically. The aim of this work is to test this hypothesis through two controlled experiments. We first control the training distribution by stratifying paired MRI-PET data by amyloid and neurodegeneration status. Using two standard synthesis models under a controlled design, we show that biologically unambiguous mappings are learnable in isolation, but performance collapses when data ambiguity is introduced. This demonstrates that ambiguity in the data distribution, rather than architectural capacity, constrains performance. Second, we show that introducing orthogonal biological information in the form of plasma biomarkers resolves this ambiguity. When multimodal inputs are incorporated, performance improves and stability is restored. Together, these findings suggest that limited and inconsistent performance in MRI-to-amyloid PET synthesis is explained by intrinsic biological ambiguity, and that stable, meaningful progress requires multimodal integration rather than architectural complexity.