Tagged: brain

A Bug in fMRI Software Could Invalidate 15 Years of Brain Research

As more and more in training is based on fMRI-based brain studies, this is notable:

Functional MRI (fMRI) is 25 years old, yet surprisingly its most common statistical methods have not been validated using real data. Here, we used resting-state fMRI data from 499 healthy controls to conduct 3 million task group analyses. Using this null data with different experimental designs, we estimate the incidence of significant results. In theory, we should find 5% false positives (for a significance threshold of 5%), but instead we found that the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%. These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results. [Emphasis added]

Read coverage from Science Alert

Paper: Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates by Anders Eklunda, Thomas E. Nicholsd, and Hans Knutsson

Paper: First Direct Evidence for Ultra-Fast Responses in Human Amygdala to Fear

For the first time, an international team of scientists has shown that the amygdala in the human brain is able to detect possible threats in the visual environment at ultra-fast time scales. By measuring the electrical activity in the amygdala of patients that had been implanted with electrodes in order to better diagnose their epilepsy, the researchers provide new data on how information travels between the visual and emotional networks…

Continue reading at Science Daily