Thousands of fMRI brain studies in doubt due to software flaws

The discovery of major software flaws could render thousands of fMRI brain studies inaccurate. The use of fMRI is a common method for scanning the brain in neuroscience and psychology experiments. To make sense of the data produced, researchers sometimes use a technique called spatial autocorrelation to identify areas of the brain that appear to "light up" during particular tasks or experiences. But some software flaws in the popular fMRI data analysis packages SPM, FSL and AFNI meant this technique routinely produced false positives, resulting in errors 50 per cent of the time or more. Anders Eklund and Hans Knutsson at Linköping University in Sweden and Thomas Nichols at the University of Warwick, UK, calculated this by analysing brain data from a collaborative open fMRI project called 1000 Functional Connectomes.