Dependent fMRI measures
- As an alternative to level and/or extent of activation, patterns of activation, such as those captured in laterality indices for language, may be more developmentally sensitive, robust, and meaningful at an individual level. Relationships between prefrontal activations and other regions may be particularly relevant to adolescent mental disorders.
- Caution is, however, warranted when combining measures as one may also be increasing error variance.
- Variability in the localization of activations might be captured with measures of distance from the maxima of group-averaged activations. The focal extent and variability in localization might serve as a metric for comparing patients versus controls.
- There is a need to increase reliability of individual results in order for fMRI to be useful clinically.
- Whole brain multivariate techniques may be particularly useful for studying changes in patterns of brain activity.
