Neuroimaging Data with Varying Results

We examined fMRI for possible uses in neuromarketing applications, and also found such variation in analysis results.   Standards in the analysis approach are important.  Another general caution for the results you achieve, even with very large databases.

Neuroimaging Results Altered by Varying Analysis Pipelines
Nature

A survey of neuroimaging studies found that nearly every study used a different analysis pipeline, and the analytical choices of individual researchers significantly impacted findings gleaned from a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) dataset. The team provided the same dataset to 70 independent research groups and asked them to test nine hypotheses, each of which asserted that activity in a specific brain region correlated with a specific task feature. There were considerable variations between each team's results, even when their underlying maps were highly correlated. The finding highlights the potential consequences of a lack of standardized pipelines for processing complex data.   ... "