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New Year, New Features

· 2 min read
Alejandro de la Vega

Hello Neurosynth Users,

2023 was a very exciting year for Neurosynth, having launched our Compose platform to the public and announced it on social media. In the December we’ve saw over 500 new user visits, with 200 users signing up for an account! 🚀

Help us keep this growth going by sharing our announcement with your colleagues. 🧑‍🔬

🌟 What’s New 🌟

We’ve also continued to introduce new features and improve the user experience. Here’s some highlights:

Large-scale association tests​

A key feature that set Neurosynth aside were large-scale association maps (previously known as “reverse inference”).

Whereas a typical meta-analysis tells you if activity is consistently reported in a target set of studies, an association test tells you if activation occurs more consistently in this set of studies versus a large and diverse reference sample.

That's important, because this allows you to control for base rate differences between regions. Certain regions, such as the insula or lateral PFC for instance, play a very broad role in cognition, and hence are consistently activated for many different tasks and cognitive states. Using MKDA Chi-Squared, you can test if brain activity in a region (such as the insula) is specifically associated with the studies in your meta-analysis.

Previously association tests were available for the automatically generated maps on neurosynth.org. Now you can perform large-scale association tests for your custom meta-analyses in Neurosynth Compose.

We have created a full primer and tutorial on MKDA Chi-Squared, including an example from a recent meta-analysis on social processing. Check it out!

MKDA Chi-Squared Tutorial 🧑‍🎓

UX Enhancements ✨​

Based on your valuable feedback, we've made numerous bug fixes and improvements:

  • Simplified Curation: The review import page has been removed, and summary information is now added directly to the tag step.

  • Searching UI: We've replaced the dropdown with a selection gallery, making it easier to choose your preferred search method, and we now auto-generate search import names. In addition, resolving duplicates is skipped if none are present.

  • Improved Editing Workflow: The editing interface has been improved, streamlining the extraction process.

  • Various UX Improvements and Fixes: We fixed many papercuts, especially in the Extraction phase.

We hope you enjoy these changes.

Email us any feedback, or ask a question on NeuroStars if you have issues.

Cheers,

The Neurosynth Team 🧠