A peak-clustering method for MEG group analysis to minimise artefacts due to smoothness

Jessica R. Gilbert, Laura R. Shapiro, Gareth R. Barnes

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Magnetoencephalography (MEG), a non-invasive technique for characterizing brain electrical activity, is gaining popularity as a tool for assessing group-level differences between experimental conditions. One method for assessing task-condition effects involves beamforming, where a weighted sum of field measurements is used to tune activity on a voxel-by-voxel basis. However, this method has been shown to produce inhomogeneous smoothness differences as a function of signal-to-noise across a volumetric image, which can then produce false positives at the group level. Here we describe a novel method for group-level analysis with MEG beamformer images that utilizes the peak locations within each participant's volumetric image to assess group-level effects. We compared our peak-clustering algorithm with SnPM using simulated data. We found that our method was immune to artefactual group effects that can arise as a result of inhomogeneous smoothness differences across a volumetric image. We also used our peak-clustering algorithm on experimental data and found that regions were identified that corresponded with task-related regions identified in the literature. These findings suggest that our technique is a robust method for group-level analysis with MEG beamformer images.
Original languageEnglish
Article numbere45084
Number of pages9
JournalPLoS ONE
Volume7
Issue number9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 14 Sept 2012

Bibliographical note

© Gilbert et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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