Journal Article

The Influence of Study-Level Inference Models and Study Set Size on Coordinate-Based fMRI Meta-Analyses

Seurinck, Ruth, Banaschewski, Tobias, Lemaitre, Herve, Paus, Tomáš, Martinot, Jean-Luc, Barker, Gareth J., Bokde, Arun L. W., Kühn, Simone, Moerkerke, Beatrijs, Bossier, Han, Millenet, Sabina

2018

Overview

Given the increasing amount of neuroimaging studies, there is a growing need to summarize published results. Coordinate-based meta-analyses use the locations of statistically significant local maxima with possibly the associated effect sizes to aggregate studies. In this paper, we investigate the influence of key characteristics of a coordinate-based meta-analysis on (1) the balance between false and true positives and (2) the activation reliability of the outcome from a coordinate-based meta-analysis. More particularly, we consider the influence of the chosen group level model at the study level [fixed effects, ordinary least squares (OLS), or mixed effects models], the type of coordinate-based meta-analysis [Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) that only uses peak locations, fixed effects, and random effects meta-analysis that take into account both peak location and height] and the amount of studies included in the analysis (from 10 to 35). To do this, we apply a resampling scheme on a large dataset ( = 1,400) to create a test condition and compare this with an independent evaluation condition. The test condition corresponds to subsampling participants into studies and combine these using meta-analyses. The evaluation condition corresponds to a high-powered group analysis. We observe the best performance when using mixed effects models in individual studies combined with a random effects meta-analysis. Moreover the performance increases with the number of studies included in the meta-analysis. When peak height is not taken into consideration, we show that the popular ALE procedure is a good alternative in terms of the balance between type I and II errors. However, it requires more studies compared to other procedures in terms of activation reliability. Finally, we discuss the differences, interpretations, and limitations of our results.

• Publisher: Frontiers Research Foundation,Frontiers Media S.A
• Subject: Algorithms / Child & adolescent psychiatry / coordinate-based meta-analysis / Experiments / fMRI / Functional magnetic resonance imaging / group modeling / Medical imaging / Meta-analysis / Methods / mixed effects models / Neuroimaging / Neuroscience / Neurosciences / NMR / Nuclear magnetic resonance / Psychotherapy / random effects models / reliability / Statistical analysis / Studies