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Neuroimaging results altered by varying analysis pipelines

Seventy laboratories that analysed the same neuroimaging data each produced different results. This finding highlights the potential consequences of a lack of standardized pipelines for processing complex data.
  1. Martin Lindquist

    1. Martin Lindquist is in the Department of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland 21205, USA.

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For most types of big data, from genome sequences to medical images, there is no single ‘best’ way to process the data. This issue is exemplified by the substantial differences in how individual laboratories preprocess and analyse data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments, which generate information about brain activity. Indeed, a survey of fMRI studies found that nearly every study used a different analysis pipeline1. Writing in Nature, Botvinik-Nezer et al.2 provide further evidence of this variability, highlighting how analytical choices made by individual researchers can greatly influence the findings gleaned from an fMRI data set. The work is bound to spark lively discussion.

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Nature 582, 36-37 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01282-z

References

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