11–20 of 192 posts
"Our results suggest that the principal cause of the invalid cluster inferences is spatial autocorrelation functions that do not follow the assumed Gaussian shape." In other words, researchers cut corners. You should never assume that something is a certain way without rigorously proving it. How did these papers make it past peer review?
n=30 ought to be enough for anybody
It's already been known for several years that almost all MRI brain scan research is wrong, what exactly is new here?
Source for a layman?
It's already been known for several years that almost all MRI brain scan research is wrong, what exactly is new here?
If this results to be true, this could be one of the most expensive bugs in computer history.
Doesn't sound like a straight up bug, but rather unsound statistical methods which can happen with or without software. You get the same problem with finite element analysis software: the operator has to be aware of all the assumptions baked in, and has to ensure that the input conforms to them.
From the paper: "Using this null data with different experimental designs, we estimate the incidence of significant results. In theory, we should find 5% false positives (for a significance threshold of 5%), but instead we found that the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%." (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/06/27/1602413113.full)
Choosing a bad algorithm for your software is as much of a bug as a null-pointer crash, and is something that needs to be tested for when building software.
And I wonder if the software was at one point correct and then this bug was introduced at a later point? Many times it feels like after a company does a formal scientific validation they never do it again despite the fact they have engineers constantly working on the code...
It's already been known for several years that almost all MRI brain scan research is wrong, what exactly is new here?
> almost all MRI brain scan research is wrong Source for a layman?
It's easy to imagine the main difficulty with this is mapping signal to actual thoughts and regions. It's a really complex biology and physics to reduce.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> almost all MRI brain scan research is wrong Source for a layman?
I wasn't in fmri research but some fellow students in my lab were on it. I do know there was a study with dead salmon which were showing up as having "active" brain regions. I have to find it but am on my phone. It's easy to imagine the main difficulty with this is mapping signal to actual thoughts and regions. It's a really complex biology and physics to reduce.