fMRI lie detection and the Semrau case

Semrau is a psychologist accused of committing fraud to Medicare and Medicaid. The case became mostly famous, because he asked that fMRI lie detection would be a evidence in court. The judge had to decide if fMRI was admissible and after hearing scientists advocating for both sides, he has decided not to admit such evidence. However, the question is: Will it be possible to use fMRI lie detection one day?, because the reason for not admitting it has been based on the error rates and acceptance by scientific community and that can change any day...



Image from here

So how does fMRI lie detection work at the moment?
- A deception task is presented to the volunteers: they have to lie about the object they have taken from a box (or similar, such as a card from envelope).
- The volunteer goes inside the scanner and structural MRI is performed and a motor task can also be performed to make the volunteers more familiar with the MRI itself.
- The deception task starts and the volunteer is asked questions about the stolen object among other questions. The volunteer has to lie about stealing the object. During this time, EPI (Echo Planar Imaging) images are acquired.
- Processing of data starts, which includes reorientation and motion correction. Brain patterns are analyzed to detect lying.

Findings have shown that there are specific activated areas (anterior cingulate and the prefrontal cortex) in subjects in the task of deception when a group study is performed. This is a group study, but for fMRI to become a lie detector, it has to stand in individual studies. This has been difficult, because fMRI is a technique with a low signal-to-noise ratio, but some studies have been done. Moreover, deception tasks in these studies are still simple ones, while more complex ones (like the Semrau case) have not been performed.

One of the studies which presented results on individual basis (the one referenced here at the bottom) has led that a company has been formed to sell this type of service (CEPHOS). This was the company involved in the Semrau case and the CEO of this company is the scientist advocating for the fMRI lie detection. The two scientists which advocated against the fMRI lie detector were Marc Raichle, PhD (Wash. U. St. Louis, Neuroscience) and Peter Imrey, PhD (Cleveland Clinic, Statistics).

Anyway, my personal belief is that fMRI should be on the service of health and not of law...

Other Links:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5984/1336.1.full
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/05/fmri-lie-detection-gets-its-day-.html
http://blogs.law.stanford.edu/lawandbiosciences/2012/09/07/hot-news-6th-circuit-affirms-in-us-v-semrau-says-no-to-fmri-lie-detection/

Kozel, F., Johnson, K., Mu, Q., Grenesko, E., Laken, S., & George, M. (2005). Detecting Deception Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Biological Psychiatry, 58 (8), 605-613 DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.07.040

TEDMED 2013

I hope you have already heard about TED before (if not, seriously check it out here). TEDMED is a TED conference dedicated only to medical issues and it starts today. I hope medical imaging will be part of some talks...

The schedule of the conference is here, but most important it is possible to watch the conference online in real-time or on-demand following a couple of instructions. I'll see it later on-demand according to my interests and time. Right now, the talks I am looking forward are:
- Can Science take the next leap? by Francis Collins
- What's the 21st century version of prevention? by Danny Hillis
- How can we improve health care if doctors don't know if they do any good? by Michael E. Porter

The TEDMED experience:

The videos from last year can be accessed online in TEDMED youtube channel.

Obama's BRAIN Initiative

On the 2nd April, President Obama has made a speech about a new initiative to study the brain. This new initiative is called BRAIN - Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies.This initiative has been inspired in the Genome Project. His speech can be seen here or read here.



For me, the most important remark was: "So there is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked, and the BRAIN Initiative will change that by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. " My work is close to this idea using, of course, medical imaging, so I am really interested in this initiative.




About the budget involved, it might be considerably smaller than the Genome Project (3.8 billion), but the announced kick-start for the project was about 100$ million, while for the Genome Project was 28$ million. This kick-start will fund projects in the scope of the initiative: 50$ million from DARPA, 40$ million from NIH and 20$ million from NSF. Private sector will also contribute about 158$ million: 60$ million from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, 30$ million from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 28$ million from Salk Institute for Biological Studies and 4$ million from the Kavli Foundation, among others.

White House links: Blog, Fact Sheet and Infographics

The risk of medical imaging

In the last few years, there has been in the media several news warning to the effects of medical imaging which use ionizing radiation:

http://ps.columbia.edu/news/new-study-confirms-ps-researchers%E2%80%99-predictions-ct-induced-cancer-kids
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-05/arrs-roc041912.php
http://coloncancer.about.com/b/2010/12/06/do-ct-scans-cause-cancer.htm

The editor William Hendee of Medical Physics has written an editorial about this topic:
http://online.medphys.org/resource/1/mphya6/v40/i4/p040401_s1?view=fulltext&bypassSSO=1

Most professionals are actually worried that people start refusing to undertake medical exams. Do you think this will happen?

The Future of Health

Stanford has again a series of small lectures about the future of health.
Visualizing desire is one of these lectures:

The complete set of lectures is here:
http://www.youtube.com/course?list=EC32BC95C9D7E5959C