As well as providing information that may clearly be of value in a clinical setting in the

form of classification accuracy, which communicates the level of confidence we can have in the predictions made by this type of analysis, these “braindecoding” methods can also produce maps which indicate the levels to which different brain regions are involved in the classification accuracy that has been achieved. However, here a note of caution is in order. Unlike the maps produced by the more commonly used mass- univariate methods which can be unequivocally- interpreted in terms of the size of the effect (eg, difference in response between groups) at each voxel, the maps produced by the machine Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical learning methods explicitly contain the effects of interactions between voxels or brain regions. In other words, a particular voxel could be important in distinguishing two groups either because there is a large Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical difference in function or structure at that point or because

there is a small difference that is highly correlated with those in many other brain regions, gaining importance from these correlations. There are two main consequences arising from this. The first is that the maps may be inherently more sensitive in depicting effects than those that we may be accustomed Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical to seeing (though this is debated and is still undergoing detailed study). The second is that, unlike univariate maps, that can be subjected to statistical thresholding at a particular P value, thresholding these multivariate maps is more challenging, and the most effective way to accomplish this is an active area of www.selleckchem.com/products/Bafetinib.html investigation. To Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical summarize the above discussion, both the mass-uni variate and multivariate “brain reading” methods of analyzing MRI data can give information about the location of disease-related changes in structure or function. The univariate methods are in fact easier

to interpret, but may be less sensitive in detecting small changes to distributed systems. Few would argue, however, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical that if properly carried out, both approaches can potentially produce useful maps. It is valuable at this point, however, to consider the relationship between producing a reliable map and establishing a usable biomarker for a psychiatric illness. The concept of a biomarker contains within it the idea of classification. through It associates a pattern of changes in brain structure or function with a particular mental state. This is in fact the core idea of the “brain-reading” methodologies, as stated above. However, without knowledge of the classification accuracy associated with the map of brain changes, the map itself has little value. In a distinction between two classes, a random allocation process would produce a classification accuracy of 50%.