Science & Technology

Bug may invalidate 15 years of brain research

By T.K. Randall
July 8, 2016

Image: Quintephone Brainwave Regen Poster
Credit: Glogger / CC BY-SA 3.0 (adapted) The problem was discovered by researchers from Sweden and the UK who analyzed the data produced by three of the most widely used software applications for scanning the brain.

Their findings indicated that up to 70% of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans produce at least one false positive due to the number of bugs present in the software.

This means that the results of over 40,000 studies over the last 15 years may be totally worthless."Functional MRI is 25 years old, yet surprisingly its most common statistical methods have not been validated using real data," the researchers wrote.

"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%. These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results."

It still remains unclear exactly how many studies might be affected by this as not all brain research uses the same software and the potential for false positives doesn't mean they will always occur.

Even so, this discovery could set brain research back several years.

Source: IB Times

Tags: Brain, Software