Trends in the sample size, statistics, and contributions to the BrainMap database of activation likelihood estimation meta-analyses: An empirical study of 10-year data.

The literature of neuroimaging meta-analysis has been thriving for over a decade. A majority of them were coordinate-based meta-analyses, particularly the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) approach. A meta-evaluation of these meta-analyses was performed to qualitatively evaluate their design and reporting standards. The publications listed from the BrainMap website were screened. Six hundred and three ALE papers published during 2010-2019 were included and analysed. For reporting standards, most of the ALE papers reported their total number of Papers involved and mentioned the inclusion/exclusion criteria on Paper selection. However, most papers did not describe how data redundancy was avoided when multiple related Experiments were reported within one paper. The most prevalent repeated-measures correction methods were voxel-level FDR (54.4%) and cluster-level FWE (33.8%), with the latter quickly replacing the former since 2016. For study characteristics, sample size in terms of number of Papers included per ALE paper and number of Experiments per analysis seemed to be stable over the decade. One-fifth of the surveyed ALE papers failed to meet the recommendation of having >17 Experiments per analysis. For data sharing, most of them did not provide input and output data. In conclusion, the field has matured well in terms of rising dominance of cluster-level FWE correction, and slightly improved reporting on elimination of data redundancy and providing input data. The provision of Data and Code availability statements and flow chart of literature screening process, as well as data submission to BrainMap, should be more encouraged.

Neural architecture underlying classification of face perception paradigms.

We present a novel strategy for deriving a classification system of functional neuroimaging paradigms that relies on hierarchical clustering of experiments archived in the BrainMap database. The goal of our proof-of-concept application was to examine the underlying neural architecture of the face perception literature from a meta-analytic perspective, as these studies include a wide range of tasks. Task-based results exhibiting similar activation patterns were grouped as similar, while tasks activating different brain networks were classified as functionally distinct. We identified four sub-classes of face tasks: (1) Visuospatial Attention and Visuomotor Coordination to Faces, (2) Perception and Recognition of Faces, (3) Social Processing and Episodic Recall of Faces, and (4) Face Naming and Lexical Retrieval. Interpretation of these sub-classes supports an extension of a well-known model of face perception to include a core system for visual analysis and extended systems for personal information, emotion, and salience processing. Overall, these results demonstrate that a large-scale data mining approach can inform the evolution of theoretical cognitive models by probing the range of behavioral manipulations across experimental tasks.

ICA model order selection of task co-activation networks.

Independent component analysis (ICA) has become a widely used method for extracting functional networks in the brain during rest and task. Historically, preferred ICA dimensionality has widely varied within the neuroimaging community, but typically varies between 20 and 100 components. This can be problematic when comparing results across multiple studies because of the impact ICA dimensionality has on the topology of its resultant components. Recent studies have demonstrated that ICA can be applied to peak activation coordinates archived in a large neuroimaging database (i.e., BrainMap Database) to yield whole-brain task-based co-activation networks. A strength of applying ICA to BrainMap data is that the vast amount of metadata in BrainMap can be used to quantitatively assess tasks and cognitive processes contributing to each component. In this study, we investigated the effect of model order on the distribution of functional properties across networks as a method for identifying the most informative decompositions of BrainMap-based ICA components. Our findings suggest dimensionality of 20 for low model order ICA to examine large-scale brain networks, and dimensionality of 70 to provide insight into how large-scale networks fractionate into sub-networks. We also provide a functional and organizational assessment of visual, motor, emotion, and interoceptive task co-activation networks as they fractionate from low to high model-orders.

The functional connectivity of the human caudate: an application of meta-analytic connectivity modeling with behavioral filtering.

Meta-analysis based techniques are emerging as powerful, robust tools for developing models of connectivity in functional neuroimaging. Here, we apply meta-analytic connectivity modeling to the human caudate to 1) develop a model of functional connectivity, 2) determine if meta-analytic methods are sufficiently sensitive to detect behavioral domain specificity within region-specific functional connectivity networks, and 3) compare meta-analytic driven segmentation to structural connectivity parcellation using diffusion tensor imaging. Results demonstrate strong coherence between meta-analytic and data-driven methods. Specifically, we found that behavioral filtering resulted in cognition and emotion related structures and networks primarily localized to the head of the caudate nucleus, while perceptual and action specific regions localized to the body of the caudate, consistent with early models of nonhuman primate histological studies and postmortem studies in humans. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) revealed support for meta-analytic connectivity modeling's (MACM) utility in identifying both direct and indirect connectivity. Our results provide further validation of meta-analytic connectivity modeling, while also highlighting an additional potential, namely the extraction of behavioral domain specific functional connectivity.

The BrainMap strategy for standardization, sharing, and meta-analysis of neuroimaging data.

BACKGROUND: Neuroimaging researchers have developed rigorous community data and metadata standards that encourage meta-analysis as a method for establishing robust and meaningful convergence of knowledge of human brain structure and function. Capitalizing on these standards, the BrainMap project offers databases, software applications, and other associated tools for supporting and promoting quantitative coordinate-based meta-analysis of the structural and functional neuroimaging literature. FINDINGS: In this report, we describe recent technical updates to the project and provide an educational description for performing meta-analyses in the BrainMap environment. CONCLUSIONS: The BrainMap project will continue to evolve in response to the meta-analytic needs of biomedical researchers in the structural and functional neuroimaging communities. Future work on the BrainMap project regarding software and hardware advances are also discussed.

ALE Meta-Analysis Workflows Via the Brainmap Database: Progress Towards A Probabilistic Functional Brain Atlas.

With the ever-increasing number of studies in human functional brain mapping, an abundance of data has been generated that is ready to be synthesized and modeled on a large scale. The BrainMap database archives peak coordinates from published neuroimaging studies, along with the corresponding metadata that summarize the experimental design. BrainMap was designed to facilitate quantitative meta-analysis of neuroimaging results reported in the literature and supports the use of the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) method. In this paper, we present a discussion of the potential analyses that are possible using the BrainMap database and coordinate-based ALE meta-analyses, along with some examples of how these tools can be applied to create a probabilistic atlas and ontological system of describing function-structure correspondences.

ALE meta-analysis: controlling the false discovery rate and performing statistical contrasts.

Activation likelihood estimation (ALE) has greatly advanced voxel-based meta-analysis research in the field of functional neuroimaging. We present two improvements to the ALE method. First, we evaluate the feasibility of two techniques for correcting for multiple comparisons: the single threshold test and a procedure that controls the false discovery rate (FDR). To test these techniques, foci from four different topics within the literature were analyzed: overt speech in stuttering subjects, the color-word Stroop task, picture-naming tasks, and painful stimulation. In addition, the performance of each thresholding method was tested on randomly generated foci. We found that the FDR method more effectively controls the rate of false positives in meta-analyses of small or large numbers of foci. Second, we propose a technique for making statistical comparisons of ALE meta-analyses and investigate its efficacy on different groups of foci divided by task or response type and random groups of similarly obtained foci. We then give an example of how comparisons of this sort may lead to advanced designs in future meta-analytic research.

BrainMap taxonomy of experimental design: description and evaluation.

Coordinate-based, voxel-wise meta-analysis is an exciting recent addition to the human functional brain mapping literature. In view of the critical importance of selection criteria for any valid meta-analysis, a taxonomy of experimental design should be an important tool for aiding in the design of rigorous meta-analyses. The coding scheme of experimental designs developed for and implemented within the BrainMap database provides a candidate taxonomy. In this study, the BrainMap experimental-design taxonomy is described and evaluated by comparing taxonomy fields to data-filtering choices made by subject-matter experts carrying out meta-analyses of the functional imaging literature. Fifteen publications reporting a total of 46 voxel-wise meta-analyses were included in this assessment. Collectively these 46 meta-analyses pooled data from 351 publications, selected for experimental similarity within each meta-analysis. Filter implementations within BrainMap were graded by ease-of-use (A-C) and by stage-of-use (1-3). Quality filters and content filters were tabulated separately. Quality filters required for data entry into BrainMap were classed as mandatory (five filters), being above the use grading system. All authors spontaneously adopted the five mandatory filters in constructing their meta-analysis, indicating excellent agreement on data quality among authors and between authors and the BrainMap development team. Two non-mandatory quality filters (group size and imaging modality) were applied by all authors; both were Stage 1, Grade A filters. Field-of-view filters were the least-accessible quality filters (Stage 3, Grade C); two field-of-view filters were applied by six and four authors, respectively. Authors made a total of 115 content-filter choices. Of these, 78 (68%) were Stage 1, Grade A filters; 16 (14%) were Stage 2, Grade A; and 21 (18%) were Stage 2, Grade C. No author-applied filter was absent from the taxonomy.