Overview & motivation

Please provide a short description of your project.

  • What is the current situation/problem, what are the aims of the project?

Ioannidis (2005) claimed that most findings in the behavioral sciences are false and therefore, cannot be replicated. These claims were supported by Open Science Collaboration (2015). It was hypothesized that a lot of studies are underpowered and a lack of open communication about concrete procedures that were used would cause this so called „replication crisis“ (Nosek et al., 2015). Study pre-registrations, the promotion of an open research culture where data that was used in studies is accessible for everyone and clear documentation how the study was conducted are proposed as solutions for this (Hillary & Medaglia, 2020; Nosek et al., 2015).

This project aims at investigating if the results of the following study Bezmaternykh et al. (2021) are reproducible with the tools that were used. This is relevant because the study aspires to identify concrete differences within the brain activity between healthy subjects and subjects that are diagnosed with depression. Furthermore, it was investigated how this changes pre and post different treatment options. The latter will not be investigated in this project. In applied life sciences and later steps the goal is to use this information to judge the effectiveness of treatments and to find characteristic brain activity patterns for depressed patients. Therefore, the results have to be reliable to draw conclusions in a clinical setting which affects the well-being of patients as well as how much money will be invested in which therapy option for an individual patient.

  • What is the motivation to conduct the project?

The motivation to conduct this project is that we both want to focus our masters program in terms of methodic on MRI. Therefore, we wanted to get more experienced how data preprocessing and analysis work in this field. The focus was on examining the effects of depression on brain activity as it is one of neuropsychiatric diseases with a high prevalence that causes a lot of direct and indirect costs in the health system (Guilbert, 2003; Wang et al., 2017). That means it is important to treat it effectively and to understand the underlaying mechanisms of this disease. We found the dataset of Bezmaternykh et al. (2021) and the published article. The authors compared functional connectivity between a group of depressed patients and healthy controls during resting state fMRI. In their analysis they found results regarding the default mode network (DMN) that were not in line with further studies that investigated functional connectivity in depressed patients as well (Dai et al., 2019). This finding made it interesting for us to try to replicate these results with the same data and set the main focus of the replicated results on the DMN.

  • What is the proposed approach to conduct the project?

    • Literature search

    • Selecting dataset that was already part of a published study

    • Formulate hypotheses

    • Pre-registration (available here: https://osf.io/hfy7n)

    • Data preprocessing

    • Data analysis

    • Preparing a poster

    • Talk

Welcome! Project outline & management plan