STATISTICAL APPROACHES TO HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING BY FUNCTIONAL MAGNETIC-RESONANCE-IMAGING

Proper use of functional neuro-imaging through effective experimental design and modern statistical analysis provides new insights in curren t brain research. This tutorial has two aims: to describe aspects of t his technology to applied statisticians and to provide some statistica l ideas to neuroscientists unfamiliar with quantitative analytic metho ds that accommodate randomness. Introductory background material and a mple references to current literature on the physics of magnetic reson ance imaging, Fourier methods for image reconstruction and measures of image quality are included. Two of the statistical approaches mention ed here are extensions of established methods for longitudinal data an alysis to the frequency domain. A recent case study provides real-worl d instances of approaches, problems and open questions encountered in current functional neuro-imaging research and an introduction to the a nalysis of spatial time series in this context.