Topic 6 Assignment Dead Salmon Study f MRI PDF

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Assignment from Professor Matthew Giobbi's class....

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Please outline and discuss the "Dead Salmon" study as lectured on by Dr. Giobbi, discussed in the BRAINWASHED reading, and available on the course links page. Give an outline of what the study found and why it is important for us to consider as researchers. Please be sure to write at least 500 words with critical thought. Please be sure to enter into the assignment text box for timely grading. The dead salmon study presented incredibly fascinating, albeit very comical, findings that changed all future fMRI studies and how we interpret them since the study was released. It started out as somewhat of a joke, in that Dr. Craig Bennett and the rest of this team were test running the fMRI machine with various items such as a pumpkin and a cornish game hen. It wasn’t until Bennett went to the supermarket early one morning and bought a full length Atlantic salmon - “for science” - that the study really began. As funny as it may seem, they ran the dead salmon through the fMRI machine, asked it questions as if it were a real patient, and left the rest alone. Now all joking aside, when this was all happening, there was a lot of controversy in regards to false positives and false negatives in fMRI studies. A false positive would mean that something came up on the scan that was not real, but a false negative is when nothing was shown on the scan when there really was something there. Which is more dangerous? The blog entry by The Scicurious Brain in Scientific American seems to believe that false positives are worse because they have a greater tendency of getting blown out of proportion and causing problems. I definitely agree that it is less dangerous to miss something that is actually on the scan than to potentially cause a frenzy over something that is false, and this applies to all kinds of studies. For example, Andrew Wakefield published his findings that the mumps, measles, and rubella vaccine is linked to autism. This study was debunked and it was found that Wakefield’s results were fraudulent. Despite the fact that his study was discredited, there are millions of people still under the impression that vaccinating children leads to autism. And today, many years after the fact, there are measles outbreaks all over the country because parents who didn’t vaccinate their children are allowing them to expose and infect others. This is just one example of many why a false positive is a very dangerous thing in research studies. So when a study was being done on the proper analysis of fMRI data, the normal multiple comparisons from the salmon were compared as an example to the multiple corrected comparisons. This process is useful, but as the article stated, it tends to lose its statistical significance this way and in addition, dangerous false positives. They found increased activity in the brain and spinal cord in a dead fish, which is obviously impossible. This paved the way for more accurate representations and studies based on fMRI scans because they pointed out the importance of using multiple corrected comparisons in every study involving fMRI scans. The article stated that after the dead salmon study, the amount of people not using multiple corrected comparisons went from 25-40% to 10%. This is a very important change because perhaps it will stop studies from publishing false positive or false negative results and skewing the general population’s opinions as Andrew Wakefield had....