Science
Related: About this forumBug in fMRI software calls 15 years of research into question
A bug in the software used by researchers to interpret fMRI data could invalidate fifteen years worth of neuroscientific research, a paper claims.
Three of the most popular pieces of software for fMRI SPM, FSL and AFNI were all found to have false positive rates of up to 70 per cent. These findings could invalidate "up to 40,000 papers", researchers claim.
fMRI measures blood flow inside the brain and, by proxy, brain activity. It assumes cerebral blood flow is coupled or correlated with neural activity, and has been used to explore how the human brain responds to robots, how memory and imagination interact, how the brain looks when someone has an idea and more.
"Though fMRI is 25 years old, surprisingly its most common statistical methods have not been validated using real data," said Anders Eklund.
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/fmri-bug-brain-scans-results
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2016-08-25/what-science-cant-explain
Salviati
(6,008 posts)This is successful science at work. A mistake was discovered, past conclusions are brought into question, and given better methods everything we thought we knew now has to be re-examined. Science, like any human endevour, is not perfect, but it is a method that ideally self correcting.
Warpy
(111,270 posts)since it measured things like oxygen demand and glucose uptake. Unfortunately, only snapshots could be taken. The fMRI was used to map changing blood flow to various areas to see real time changes. However, it didn't actually measure the activity within the brain, itself.
It looks like people are going to have to slog through those 40,000 papers again, revising the ones that were affected by the bug.
Jim__
(14,077 posts)This is the paper cited by Wired
Here is a correction to that paper:
Additionally, the authors note that on page 7904, left column, fifth full paragraph, lines 13, It is not feasible to redo 40,000 fMRI studies, and lamentable archiving and data-sharing practices mean most could not be reanalyzed either should instead appear as Due to lamentable archiving and data-sharing practices, it is unlikely that problematic analyses can be redone.
These errors do not affect the conclusions of the article. The online version has been corrected.
Among other changes, the number 40,000 was removed, and the words weakly significant were added.
BumRushDaShow
(129,077 posts)By KATE MURPHY AUG. 27, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/opinion/sunday/do-you-believe-in-god-or-is-that-a-software-glitch.html?ref=opinion
When I had scanned the opinion section, I saw this somewhat whimsical headline but didn't bother to look... until I saw this OP!
From the article -
So it looks like it's a "hitch up the pants and move on" thing that will probably happen now.
Helen Borg
(3,963 posts)Ford_Prefect
(7,901 posts)If you want to disagree with my Oncologist please let me know. Personally I prefer the chance they may be accurate enough to help cure my wife's cancer.
The key comment in the article was: "These results question the validity of a number of fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of weakly significant neuroimaging results." That's the same as suggesting that a political poll falls very close to the margin of error.
It suggests that you take those results with the appropriate grains of salt. Hardly earth shattering news.