How reliable are results from fMRI studies?

Post Reply New Topic

Autism Speaks has been funding some neuroscientists whose work seems to me highly questionable in terms of the claims they are making. (Marcel Just is a recent example I am particularly thinking of, his claims for his neuroscience research were subject of a thread on WP not too long ago).

This link is probably not going to be of much interest to the scientifically illiterate, and it is highly technical. It's conclusions, though, are very important:

http://prefrontal.org/blog/2010/02/pape ... e-imaging/

"To conclude, functional neuroimaging with fMRI is no longer in its infancy. Instead it has reached a point of adolescence, where knowledge and methods have made enormous progress but there is still much development left to be done. Our growing pains from this point forward are going to be a more complete understanding of its strengths, weaknesses, and limitations. A working knowledge of fMRI reliability is key to this understanding. The reliability of fMRI may not be the high relative to other scientific measures, but it is presently the best tool available for the in vivo investigation of brain function."

I agree with the conclusion.

The stage of a womens period,
the level of testosterone relative to sexual/masturbatory ejaculations,
caffiene,
medications,
BIORHYTHMS,
FOODS,
mood relative to daily experience's,
can all,
throw FMRI results...

If they impute this then fine, but variability is prolly too wide for most modern algorithms
Flying high in April
Shot down in May
Only the shadow knows

What are you on?

I'm not surprised at all by this, but as a CS/biomed geek I could see the necessary recursive R *the language R* filling in these gaps within 2-3 years; there are already SO many anatomic & metabolic constructs which can feed into one another. The variability is too wide insofar as people haven't quite turned this into a computational fluid dynamics analog just yet.

Probably sleep deprivation, judging by the clarity of thought and opacity of typos.

just beer, dont humiliate me for being intelligent......

I'm dyslexic thanks Mr Nice Guy

You certainly aren't dyslexic regarding the medical sciences. Insomnia is just what I guessed while posting at 3AM.

I'll get around to reading the whole fMRI study tonight, as diffusion spectrum imaging was already on my radar. I'm a generalist techie but I like to keep track of medical gadgetry, what's your background?