Apr 15, 2017
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