Also in 2016, researchers used fMRI to look at performance anxiety.

Neuroscientists from Sussex’s Sackler Centre and Brighton and Sussex Medical School were able to identify brain regions involved with the disorder, including that the inferior parietal cortex (IPC) and the posterior superior temporal sulculus (pSTS) work together to form what is referred to as the action–observation network (AON) which helps anticipate what another person might be thinking by viewing their facial expressions.


But care needs to be used when analyzing functional MR with common statistics, as it can yield false results, researchers reported in 2016.

Anders Eklund and Hans Knutsson from Linköping University, and Thomas Nichols from the University of Warwick tested the analysis methods on “known, reliable data” and the researchers found that the methods showed false brain activity on 60 percent of images when a reasonable percentage is five.

Eklund suggested that a new method for validating the fMRI information be used that makes fewer assumptions and “a thousand times more” calculations than the conventional method that produces errors.

“Thanks to modern graphics cards, large calculations can be run,” said Eklund in a statement. “It would take 1,000 times longer to run the calculations using a normal computer, but thanks to the graphics cards, I reduced the processing time from 10 years to 20 days.”

The researchers used resting-state fMRI data from 499 healthy controls to conduct 3 million task group analyses. "Using this null data with different experimental designs, we estimate the incidence of significant results. In theory, we should find 5 percent false positives, ... 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 percent," they wrote in their study.

Back to HCB News

MRI Homepage