Large scale meta-analyses of brain imaging data

Client:

J.B. Poline

Background

J.B. works at the Brain Imaging Center. This is an on campus facility which collects brain imaging data such as anatomical and functional MRI.

Description

The project is to help data mining a web resource that collects information from brain imaging publication : http://brainspell.org/.

This site allows to enter keywords of cognitive/sensory domains such as “vision”, “memory”, etc, and extract the x,y,z coordinates that have been reported in publications in these domains. A map of the brain is constructed in the browser showing where these coordinates are across the publications.

This is potentially a very useful resource for having an overview of the regions of the brain reported in papers.

We would like to extend the tool to answer a number of question of interest linked to effect sizes and power analyses (see project objectives).

Project Objectives

Here are some examples of questions we would like to answer with brainspell:

• Are the regions found with different number of subject in studies ?
• What does the map of effect size map of effect size per cognitive domain look like ?
• How to use Map of effect size for a cognitive domain to do reverse inference (ie find what are the cognitive domains most likely associated with a brain region) ;
• Combine map of number of subjects and map of effect size to get map of power (per cognitive domain)