Identifying brain processes involved in the risk and development of mental disorders is a major aim. We recently reported substantial inter-individual heterogeneity in brain structural aberrations among patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Estimating the normative range of voxel-based morphometry (VBM) data among healthy individuals using a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) enables us to map individual deviations from the healthy range in unseen datasets. Here we aim to replicate our previous results in an independent sample of patients with schizophrenia (n=166), bipolar disorder (n=135) and healthy individuals (n=687). In line with previous findings, our results revealed robust group level differences between patients and healthy controls, yet only a small proportion of patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder exhibited extreme negative deviations from the norm in the same brain regions. These direct replications support that group level-differences in brain structure disguise considerable individual differences in brain aberrations, with important implications for the interpretation and generalization of group-level brain imaging findings to the individual with a mental disorder.

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