{"paper":{"title":"How Much MRI Preprocessing Is Enough? A Cost-Utility Study for Brain MRI Foundation Models","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CV","authors_text":"Jiangshuan Pang, Jing Yan, Shiping Liu, Tao Zhou, Wangyang Tang, Youzhe He, Zhenkun Zhuang, Zhixuan Cheng","submitted_at":"2026-06-06T13:26:01Z","abstract_excerpt":"MRI preprocessing defines the input distribution seen by brain MRI foundation models, yet it is usually treated as routine data cleaning rather than a modeling choice. We ask how much preprocessing is worth its computational cost for self-supervised 3D MRI pretraining. Keeping the corpus, 3D ViT backbone, masking protocol, and downstream evaluations fixed, we compare a graded P0-P7 preprocessing spectrum for masked autoencoding (MAE) and joint-embedding predictive learning (JEPA) on 20,000 heterogeneous brain MRI volumes, then transfer the encoders to IDH prediction, MCI classification, brain "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.08164","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.08164/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}