Given the recent controversies in some neuroimaging statistical methods, we investigated pre-whitening and hemodynamic response function (HRF) modeling techniques available in AFNI, FSL and SPM and used in task-fMRI studies. We found that pre-whitening often leaves much positive autocorrelated noise in the data, which leads primarily to false positives. Also, we observed that for an event-related design dataset, the use of the simple canonical HRF led to a strong sensitivity deterioration. Currently, both specificity and sensitivity could be increased in task-fMRI studies with some less popular, but widely available statistical methods.
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