A new software program that allows neuroscientists to produce single brain images from hundreds of individual studies has been developed by a University of Colorado-Boulder research team.
The development of the software program will trim weeks and even months from often tedious, time-consuming research, according to the team.
“Because the new approach is entirely automated, it can analyze hundreds of different experimental tasks or mental states nearly instantaneously instead of requiring researchers to spend weeks or months conducting just one analysis,” said Tal Yarkoni, a postdoctoral fellow in CU-Boulder’s psychology and neuroscience department.
The software program developed by Yarkoni and his colleagues can be programmed to comb scientific literature for published articles relevant to a particular topic, and then extract all of the brain scan images from those article.
Using a statistical process called meta-analysis, researchers are then able to produce a consensus brain activation image reflecting hundreds of studies at a time.
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com.
