Thanks for the kind words. I am the first author of the "Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction" paper. Happy to take any questions here. A link to the original poster: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
It would be nice if the cost of an MRI was so low you would typically get a cheap one as part of your yearly physical and if anything popped up they could do it again in an expensive, high powered one to verify.
I've scanned about 300 people as part of my research career. The director of the imaging center reviewed every anatomical scan. From that group of 300 we informed about three people that they had an anomaly which should be examined by a doctor.
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Sure, it was 1% that needed further validation but that 1% is so much cheaper and easier to treat when its caught early vs. later on when it's noticed by the patient.
MRI's becoming commonplace, even if it were every 3 years instead of annually would be a useful tool to improve health outcomes across the board.
Marc Abrahams, organizer of the Ig Nobels, asked us for a salmon recipe to include in a cookbook they were publishing. We sent in a single page recipe for how to cook a salmon in an MRI scanner by overriding the safety protocols. That was fun to write.
Not sure the dead salmon is relevant. That paper is focused on false discovery in FUNCTIONAL MRI. Different can of fish. Most clinical work is structural MRI.
Those false positives are because fmri runs countless statistical tests and the earlier "misconfigured software" wasn't running stringent enough multiple comparisons corrections. Basically the same issue in the classic "jelly bean causes acne" xkcd (https://xkcd.com/882/). The exact number depends on voxel size, temporal resolution, and experimental condition but is somewhere close to tens of thousands of tests.
The "images" that are presented in fMRI studies and that contain false positives are representing results of statistical tests (t-values, and f-values after correction) not the contents of voxels. So the false positive rate of an fMRI has very little to do with the accuracy of a voxel's content in a structural MRI.