Do the units matter? Validity of Intensity Based Meta-Analysis in the presence of unit mismatches
Abstract
While most neuroimaging meta-analyses are based on peak coordinate data, the best practice method is an Intensity-Based Meta-Analysis that combines the voxel-wise effect estimates and their standard errors (E+SE's, aka COPE & sqrt-VARCOPE) from each study [5]. Such analysis assumes that the E+SE's are expressed in the same units across studies. In practice the observed units of the E+SE's will depend on 1) the method used to scale the BOLD signal; 2) the scaling of the explanatory variables in the design matrix; 3) the scaling of the contrast vector [4]. An analysis of E+SE's therefore requires knowledge of the data, design and contrast scaling. However those meta-data are rarely shared, leaving the researcher with E+SE's with unknown scaling.
Here, we investigate the validity of 5 random-effects meta-analytic approaches in the presence of imperfectly scaled contrast estimates.
Domains
Neurons and Cognition [q-bio.NC]Origin | Files produced by the author(s) |
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