NeuroQuery, comprehensive meta-analysis of human brain mapping

Abstract
Data availability
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Abstract

Reaching a global view of brain organization requires assembling evidence on widely different mental processes and mechanisms. The variety of human neuroscience concepts and terminology poses a fundamental challenge to relating brain imaging results across the scientific literature. Existing meta-analysis methods perform statistical tests on sets of publications associated with a particular concept. Thus, large-scale meta-analyses only tackle single terms that occur frequently. We propose a new paradigm, focusing on prediction rather than inference. Our multivariate model predicts the spatial distribution of neurological observations, given text describing an experiment, cognitive process, or disease. This approach handles text of arbitrary length and terms that are too rare for standard meta-analysis. We capture the relationships and neural correlates of 7547 neuroscience terms across 13459 neuroimaging publications. The resulting meta-analytic tool, neuroquery.org, can ground hypothesis generation and data-analysis priors on a comprehensive view of published findings on the brain.

Data availability

All the data that we can share without violating copyright (including word counts of publications) have been shared on https://github.com/neuroquery/ alongside with the analysis scripts. Everything is readily downloadable without any authorization or login required.

Article and author information

Author details

Jérôme Dockès

Parietal, INRIA, Palaiseau, France

For correspondence
jerome@dockes.org

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-5304-2496
Russell A Poldrack

Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-6755-0259
Romain Primet

Parietal, INRIA, Palaiseau, France

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Hande Gözükan

Parietal, INRIA, Palaiseau, France

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Tal Yarkoni

Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Fabian Suchanek

Data, Intelligence, and Graphs, Télécom Paris University, Palaiseau, France

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Bertrand Thirion

Parietal, INRIA, Paris, France

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Gael Varoquaux

Parietal, INRIA, Palaiseau, France

For correspondence
gael.varoquaux@inria.fr

Competing interests
Gael Varoquaux, Reviewing editor, eLife.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-1076-5122

Funding

Digiteo (2016-1270D - Projet MetaCog)

Jérôme Dockès

National Institutes of Health (R01MH096906)

Tal Yarkoni

Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-16- CE23-0007-01)

Fabian Suchanek

H2020 European Research Council (785907 (HBP SGA2))

Bertrand Thirion

H2020 European Research Council (826421 (VirtualbrainCloud))

Bertrand Thirion

Canada First Research Excellence Fund (Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives initiative)

Gael Varoquaux

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.