No abstract

Given the increasing amount of neuroimaging studies, there is a growing need to summarize published results. Coordinate-based meta-analyses use the locations of statistically significant local maxima with possibly the associated effect sizes to aggregate studies. In this paper, we investigate the influence of key characteristics of a coordinate-based meta-analysis on (1) the balance between false and true positives and (2) the activation reliability of the outcome from a coordinate-based meta-analysis. More particularly, we consider the influence of the chosen group level model at the study level [fixed effects, ordinary least squares (OLS), or mixed effects models], the type of coordinate-based meta-analysis [Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) that only uses peak locations, fixed effects, and random effects meta-analysis that take into account both peak location and height] and the amount of studies included in the analysis (from 10 to 35). To do this, we apply a resampling scheme on a large dataset (N = 1,400) to create a test condition and compare this with an independent evaluation condition. The test condition corresponds to subsampling participants into studies and combine these using meta-analyses. The evaluation condition corresponds to a high-powered group analysis. We observe the best performance when using mixed effects models in individual studies combined with a random effects meta-analysis. Moreover the performance increases with the number of studies included in the meta-analysis. When peak height is not taken into consideration, we show that the popular ALE procedure is a good alternative in terms of the balance between type I and II errors. However, it requires more studies compared to other procedures in terms of activation reliability. Finally, we discuss the differences, interpretations, and limitations of our results.

This report presents the implementation of a web tool for the extension of exposure-and toxicokinetictoxicodynamic analysis that has been developed under a specific EFSA request to Open Analytics under the framework agreement (OC/EFSA/AMU/2015/02). An open source software has been developed in R as a WEB-based tool including different components for the modelling of toxicokinetic (TK) and toxicodynamic (TD) processes within a structured workflow. The workflow provides the steps to perform such TK-TD modelling for single chemicals in the human health, animal health and ecological risk assessment. The web-based tool results in the implementation of four modules: (1) Chemical specific modules, (2) Physiological and life cycle trait modules, (3) Toxicokinetic module, and (4) Toxicodynamic module.

No abstract

Scientific progress is based on the ability to compare opposing theories and thereby develop consensus among existing hypotheses or create new ones. We argue that data aggregation (i.e. combine data across studies or research groups) for neuroscience is an important tool in this process.An important prerequisite is the ability to directly compare fMRI results over studies. In this paper, we discuss how an observed effect size in an fMRI dataanalysis can be transformed into a standardized effect size. We demonstrate how these enable direct comparison and data aggregation over studies. Furthermore, we also discuss the influence of key parameters in the design of an fMRI experiment (such as number of scans and the sample size) on (statistical)properties of standardized effect sizes. In the second part of the paper, we give 1 an overview of two approaches to aggregate fMRI results over studies. The first corresponds to extending the two-level general linear model approach as is typically used in individual fMRI studies with a third level. This requires the parameter estimates corresponding to the group models from each study together with estimated variances and meta-data. Unfortunately, there is a risk of running into unit mismatches when the primary studies use different scales to measure the BOLD response. To circumvent, it is possible to aggregate (unitless) standardized effect sizes which can be derived from summary statistics. We discuss a general model to aggregate these and different approaches to deal with between-study heterogeneity. Furthermore, we hope to further promote the usage of standardized effect sizes in fMRI research.