Like seeing faces in the clouds? – false positive results in functional neuroimaging

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging has been around since 25
years.


Last year, in 2016, a scientific article has been published
stating that perhaps 40,000 published neuroimaging works are
flawed. This article, published in the prestigious journal PNAS,
has brought the authors and this topic abruptly into the focus.


Most media coverage drastically truncated their core message,
stating only that fMRI produced incorrect results and that one
analysis software contained a bug. Scientific colleagues
vehemently criticized the far-reaching statements of the three
authors.


But what is actually true? Do we have to deal here with a
bankruptcy of a whole scientific branch?


How many studies are affected? The number has been corrected by
the authors from 40.000 to 3.500 studies which might have not
used appropriate, i.e. too lenient statistical correction
methods.


In this episode, I'm going to talk not only to one expert but to
four neuroscientists about this subject:


John Dylan Haynes is a Professor at the Bernstein Center for
Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany and director of the
Berlin Center for Advanced Neuroimaging. He has become
particularly known through his work on free will. For this work,
he employed new methods which identify and classify recurring
patterns in brain activation which allows for conclusions about
the underlying subjective processes by means of the fMRI data
only.


Rainer Goebel is a Professor of Cognitive Neurosciences at the
University of Maastricht in the Netherlands and developer of
the commercial software BrainVoyager. His field of research
covers the areas of high-field MRI and neurofeedback.


As a third guest, I am very pleased to be able to interview one
of the authors of this notorious study. Tom Nichols is a
Professor in Coventry in the Department of Statistics (University
of Warwick), as well as Senior Research Fellow at the Alan Turing
Institute. He has published numerous papers in particular on
statistical procedures in neuroimaging.


These interviews are completed by Dina Wittfoth, head of the fMRI
unit at Hannover Medical School’s Institute of Neuroradiology,
Germany. Her research expertise is built around the neural and
behavioral correlates of emotion regulation. She also enjoys
teaching and offers workshops for data analysis in neuroimaging
which focus on learning-by-doing.


In these interviews you will hear neuroscience experts’
perspectives on the allegations that most fMRI studies are
flawed.


More information and shownotes at


inside-brains.com