Wednesday, August 2, 2017

"A bug in fMRI software could invalidate 15 years of brain research"



"To test how good this software actually is, Eklund and his team gathered resting-state fMRI data from 499 healthy people sourced from databases around the world, split them up into groups of 20, and measured them against each other to get 3 million random comparisons.
They tested the three most popular fMRI software packages for fMRI analysis - SPM, FSL, and AFNI - and while they shouldn't have found much difference across the groups, the software resulted in false-positive rates of up to 70 percent... 
The bad news here is that one of the bugs the team identified has been in the system for the past 15 years, which explains why so many papers could now be affected.
The bug was corrected in May 2015, at the time the researchers started writing up their paper, but the fact that it remained undetected for over a decade shows just how easy it was for something like this to happen, because researchers just haven't had reliable methods for validating fMRI results."


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