Friday, July 29, 2016

fMRI Power Analysis with NeuroPower



One of my biggest peeves is complaints about how power analyses are too hard. I often hear things like "I don't have the time," or "I don't know how to use Matlab," or "I'm being held captive in the MRI control room by a deranged physicist who thinks he is taking orders from the Quench button."

Well, Mr. Whiny-Pants, it's time to stop making excuses - a new tool called NeuroPower lets you do power analyses quickly and easily, right from your web browser. The steps are simple: Upload a result from your pilot study, enter a few parameters - sample size, correction threshold, credit card number - and, if you listen closely, you can hear the electricity of the Internet go booyakasha as it finishes your power analysis. Also, if a few days later you notice some odd charges on your credit card statement, I know nothing about that.

The following video will help you use NeuroPower and will answer all of your questions about power analysis, including:

  • What is a power analysis?
  • Why should I do a power analysis?
  • Why shouldn't I do a power analysis on a full dataset I already collected?
  • How much money did you spend at Home Depot to set up the lighting for your videos?
  • What's up with the ducks? "Quack cocaine"? Seriously?

All this, and more, now in 1080p. Click the full screen button for the full report.


6 comments:

  1. The neuro power tools website seems to be down.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, I just noticed that as well. I'm not sure why that happened; it's too bad, since I just made a video promoting their site. Maybe it'll be back up soon.

      -Andy

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  2. Hi, I uploaded a T image from a group pilot study and entered all stuff needed and everything worked fine in NeuroPower.
    I did it again with a ROI mask which we used in the study but then I got the following error:
    "The selected statistical map and mask do not have the same dimensions."
    This is weird as the mask worked well with the SPM analysis.
    Any idea is greatly appreciated.
    Best,
    Jale

    ReplyDelete
  3. Having the same issue - did this ever get resolved?
    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Are you referring to the site being down? It was up last time I checked, but it may be that they periodically take it offline for whatever reason.

      If you're referring to the mask dimensions issue, I would try resampling it to make sure that the voxel size and image dimensions match; you can find out how to do that here: https://andysbrainbook.readthedocs.io/en/latest/SPM/SPM_Short_Course/SPM_09_ROIAnalysis.html#using-the-command-line-for-roi-analysis


      Best,

      -Andy

      Delete
  4. Hi Andy, do you know another tool to do the analysis? NeuroPower is down again.
    Thanks

    ReplyDelete