Movement During Brain Scans May Lead to Spurious Patterns

Head movements taint the results of many brain imaging studies, particularly those analyzing children or individuals with autism. That’s the sobering message from two independent studies published over the past few months in NeuroImage.Both reports analyze so-called 'resting-state functional connectivity' studies: the increasingly popular five-minute brain scans that measure synchrony between different regions when the brain is at rest.Together, they call into question high-profile findings published in the past couple of years showing that short-range connections in the brain start off strong in children and weaken over the course of typical development, while long-range connections begin weak in children and strengthen over time.In a study published 14 October, researchers reanalyzed data from several of their own functional connectivity studies after correcting for head motion and found that this maturation pattern usually disappears once head motion is taken into account.“It really, really, really sucks. My favorite result of the last five years is an artifact,” says lead investigator Steve Petersen, professor of cognitive neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis.It’s unclear how many published results head motion has skewed, and whether this changes the bottom-line conclusions. But many researchers are concerned.“It’s going to impact some findings with regard to the robustness, but whether it completely wipes out the findings that are out there is another question,” says Damien Fair, assistant professor of behavioral neuroscience and psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University. “It is going to require folks to reanalyze their data, controlling for these new ways of examining motion.”Read more at...SFARI, January 2012.