fMRI during working memory taskWIKIMEDIAFunctional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is widely used in neuroscience. But according to a recent analysis by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, one of the most commonly used software packages for fMRI data generates false-positive rates as high as 70 percent. The analysis calls some 40,000 studies into question, the researchers reported last week (June 28) in PNAS.
“Though fMRI is 25 years old, surprisingly its most common statistical methods have not been validated using real data,” study coauthor Anders Eklund of Linköping University, in Sweden, told Wired.
The imaging method divides the brain up into small units called voxels, in which brain activity is measured. Then the software sorts through these voxels and looks for “clusters” with similar activity.
Eklund and colleagues compiled publicly available resting-state fMRI data from nearly 500 healthy controls. The researchers randomly assigned some of the subjects to a control group and others to an “experimental” group. Then they fed the data into one of three commonly used software packages (SPM, FSL, and AFNI) thousands of times, Ars Technica reported.
In addition to finding a startlingly high false-positive ...
