NeuroQuery, comprehensive meta-analysis of human brain mapping
- INRIA, France
- Stanford University, United States
- University of Texas at Austin, United States
- Télécom Paris University, France
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
Russell A Poldrack
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.
Reviewing Editor
- Thomas Yeo, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Version history
- Received: November 6, 2019
- Accepted: March 3, 2020
- Accepted Manuscript published: March 4, 2020 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: April 17, 2020 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2020, Dockès et al.
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.
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NeuroQuery, comprehensive meta-analysis of human brain mapping
eLife 9:e53385.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.53385
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