fMRI bugs may invalidate many scientific papers

[user9876]

It appears that there may be bugs in the statistical software used to derive results from fMRI scans

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.

Paper:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/06/27/1602413113.full

News article
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/0...uld_upend_years_of_research/?mt=1467666616578

 

[aimossy]

woah........

 

[Woolie]

Interesting article, @user9876. Its about resting state fMRI, which is where you measure blood oxygen uptake patterns when a person is "at rest" (lying in darkness). They found one particular type of analysis - clusterwise analysis - didn't correct very well fro multiple comparisons.

So this means that we should be cautious about studies reporting group differences on resting state fMRI when the study uses clusterwise analysis. Otherwise, its business as usual.

 

[Effi]

earlier thread on this paper: http://forums.phoenixrising.me/inde...ent-have-inflated-false-positive-rates.45451/

@Kina Could you maybe merge both threads?