Software faults raise questions about the validity of brain studies

Re:Software faults raise questions about the validity of bra... by efoto on Friday July 01, 2016 @09:54PM (#12021030)

A 15 year old bug in a basic package used by fMRI software was, according to the researchers, causing numerous false positives in previously published studies. Which means some of the accepted fMRI based brain studies results are dubious.

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Re:Software faults raise questions about the validity of bra... by zbjornson on Saturday July 02, 2016 @01:04AM (#12021441)

No, that was a side note about a bug that caused a ~10% increase in false positives. The real primary issue is that the clustering methods assume Gaussian autocorrelation distributions, which don't exist in reality. They estimated a 70% false-positive rate because of this

http://m.pnas.org/content/early/2016/06/27/1602413113

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Re:Software faults raise questions about the validity of bra... by hmahncke on Saturday July 02, 2016 @12:12AM (#12021343)

As I read it, the bug was a minor issue. The bigger issue is the general false positive rate, which isn't a bug exactly, but more like a statistical modeling question - with millions of vocals, what's the appropriate way to characterize an activation as spurious?

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Re:Software faults raise questions about the validity of bra... by hammock on Friday July 01, 2016 @10:33PM (#12021120)

They were dubious anyway

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