Skip to main content

fMRI alignment example case study

Published onJan 14, 2019
fMRI alignment example case study

Challenge: Functional regions of interest in different individuals’ brains lie in idiosyncratic anatomical locations. To compare activation maps and patterns of information, experimenters register these different anatomical maps to a group template brain. Many such template brains exist, ranging from the brains of single individuals (e.g. Talairach space) that have been adopted as field standards, to template brains that represent an average of many individual brains, adopted by various software packages for neural data analysis (e.g. the fsaverage brain in Freesurfer).

What goes into the decision of which template brain is used for a study?
How do we standardize this decision process & sharing relevant information? How can we make sure data is published in a format that supports alignment of different results and re-registration to different template brains, for comparison across studies?

Proposal: Journal standards for publishing template brain alignment (choice of template brain, rationale, &c)

Demonstration: Statistics standards in journals (JNeurosci) ; CReDIT standards for attribution (Cell)

How to share: Through publishing format + existing journals. Via a new standard format.

Audience: Journal publishers; influential authors; influential labs defining new group brains; researchers implementing metastudies.
Specifically: MIT BCS faculty who are already talking about changing standards. (Rebecca Saxe, Nancy)

Comments
0
comment
No comments here
Why not start the discussion?