Annoucement_stage2_defacing

New paper out in PLOS Biology! 🧠
Defacing MRI images is essential to protect participant privacy, but are there unintended consequences?

In this registered report, we showed that defacing significantly alters manual quality assessments of structural MRI images: human raters evaluated the same images differently depending on whether facial features were present. This suggests that defacing removes not only identifiable information but also visual cues critical for assessing image quality. The risk? Poor-quality images may persist despite quality control, potentially undermining the reliability of the study. As a consequence, we recommend to perform quality control before defacing. This work is also the first paper we brought to completion as a registered report, which was not short of challenges, but we learned a ton in the process.

Huge thanks to my coauthors for their precious guidance and time investment in this project.