fMRI

Children's Healthcare of Atlanta uses many different imaging tests to uphold the mission of providing excellent patient care. One of those tests is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Using a strong magnetic field, the fMRI takes real-time photos of the brain's activity. While being scanned, patients will be asked to perform simple tasks, such as reading, thinking or just moving a body part.

[@muscleman5266]

Uhhh steve fMRI is still dark

[@calcal5135]

I, a researcher in the field, estimate that 95% (possibly all in humans) of all published fMRI studies are worthless. The reason is that subject motion creates signal variance that swamps the BOLD signal. Although motion correction algorithms are applied to the data they simply do not work well enough to reduce the motion variance to an insignificant value. Most researchers know this to be true but carry on regardless because their career depends upon doing so. Other researchers are simply ignorant of the artifacts that make this method junk.

[@doerrthecricket]

Why then are you still a researcher in the field if it is a junk method? This is also less of a problem in block designs, where spurious artefacts are averaged out over repeated blocks. There is some good literature on the weaknesses of BOLD fMRI (of which there's a lot), but certainly doesn't render it junk.

[@calcal5135]

doerrthecricket
I am now a former researcher in the field. It’s a huge problem with any experimental design. Kid yourself if you like but if you are contemplating making a career in it don’t say you weren’t warned. It’s garbage.

[@tommyboy1986]

@@calcal5135 what is a better method of functional brain scan then? SPECT?

[@katelynfe]

Good research protocols will restart and redo the images and account for the movement on the data with variance