Open Access

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

, volume 113 , issue 28 , pages 7900-7905

Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates

Anders Eklund ^{1, 2, 3}

Thomas E. Nichols ^{4, 5}

Hans Knutsson ^{1, 3}

Hide authors affiliations Show authors affiliations: 5 affiliations

Division of Medical Informatics, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Linköping University, S-581 85 Linköping, Sweden; |

Division of Statistics and Machine Learning, Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, S-581 83 Linköping, Sweden; |

Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization, Linköping University, S-581 83 Linköping, Sweden; |

⁴

Department of Statistics, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom; |

⁵

WMG, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom |

Publication type: Journal Article

Publication date: 2016-06-28

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

scimago Q1

wos Q1

SJR: 3.414

CiteScore: 16.5

Impact factor: 9.1

ISSN: 00278424, 10916490

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1602413113

Copy DOI

PubMed ID: 27357684

Multidisciplinary

Abstract

Significance

Functional MRI (fMRI) is 25 years old, yet surprisingly its most common statistical methods have not been validated using real data. Here, we 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% 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 a number of fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of weakly significant neuroimaging results.

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Cite this

GOST |

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GOST Copy

Eklund A. et al. Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates // Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2016. Vol. 113. No. 28. pp. 7900-7905.

GOST all authors (up to 50) Copy

Eklund A., Nichols T. E., Knutsson H. Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates // Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2016. Vol. 113. No. 28. pp. 7900-7905.

RIS |

Cite this

RIS Copy

TY - JOUR

DO - 10.1073/pnas.1602413113

UR - https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1602413113

TI - Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates

T2 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

AU - Eklund, Anders

AU - Nichols, Thomas E.

AU - Knutsson, Hans

PY - 2016

DA - 2016/06/28

PB - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)

SP - 7900-7905

IS - 28

VL - 113

PMID - 27357684

SN - 0027-8424

SN - 1091-6490

ER -

BibTex |

Cite this

BibTex (up to 50 authors) Copy

@article{2016_Eklund,

author = {Anders Eklund and Thomas E. Nichols and Hans Knutsson},

title = {Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates},

journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America},

year = {2016},

volume = {113},

publisher = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)},

month = {jun},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1602413113},

number = {28},

pages = {7900--7905},

doi = {10.1073/pnas.1602413113}

}

MLA

Cite this

MLA Copy

Eklund, Anders, et al. “Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 113, no. 28, Jun. 2016, pp. 7900-7905. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1602413113.

Publisher

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)

Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

scimago Q1

wos Q1

SJR

3.414

CiteScore

16.5

Impact factor

9.1

ISSN

00278424 (Print)

10916490 (Electronic)