Here’s the problem: if the software doesn’t work correctly, the images generated may be incorrect: a part of your brain that appears active may not actually be active. In astudy published in the journal PNAS, researchers fromLinköping University in Sweden, Anders Eklunda, Thomas E. Nicholsd, and Hans Knutssona, examined fMRI data from 499 healthy patients and found that the software (i.e.,SPM, FSL, and AFNI) used to generate the fMRI images often showed parts of the brain lighting up when it shouldn’t have, in some cases up to 70% of the time (i.e., a false positive rate of up to 70%). These software packages had bugs or glitches in them that were leading to faulty images and may have existed for 15 years until they were recently found and corrected. This means that up to around 40,000 fMRI studies published in the scientific literature over this period could have shown incorrect results.
A major discovery (and not the good kind) can mean that up to 40,000 research studies about how the brain functions published over the past 15 years could go out the window. There has been a bug (and not the insect kind) in the software used to create functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) images of the brain. fMRI is an imaging technology widely used to generate pictures of the brain and its activity. If you have ever seen a picture of the brain with different colors in different parts of the brain showing brain activity, that’s fMRI. So, many of the studies that have told us what happens in your brain when you work, play, exercise, have sex, etc. may be wrong. This is (in technical language)
That's essentially the type of diagram that scientists have been using as a map of the human brain for more than 100 years. By combining data from a handful of imaging techniques, an international coalition of researchers has created one of the most precise maps of the human brain ever seen. The new map, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, divides the brain up into 180 unique brain regions, of which 97 have never been identified before. "This is something of a landmark in terms of mapping the brain that we are very excited to share with the world," David Van Essen, one of the paper's authors and the alumni endowed professor of neuroscience at the Washington University Medical School in St. Louis, Missouri, told Business Insider.
That's essentially the type of diagram that scientists have been using as a map of the human brain for more than 100 years. By combining data from a handful of imaging techniques, an international coalition of researchers has created one of the most precise maps of the human brain ever seen. The new map, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, divides the brain up into 180 unique brain regions, of which 97 have never been identified before. "This is something of a landmark in terms of mapping the brain that we are very excited to share with the world," David Van Essen, one of the paper's authors and the alumni endowed professor of neuroscience at the Washington University Medical School in St. Louis, Missouri, told Business Insider.
Analysis of family-wise error rates in statistical parametric mapping using rand.pdf
