Testing for difference between two groups of functional neuroimaging experiments

We describe a meta-analytic method that tests for the difference between two groups of functional neuroimaging experiments. We use kernel density estimation in three-dimensional brain space to convert points representing focal brain activations into a voxel-based representation. We find the maximum in the subtraction between two probability densities and compare its value against a resampling distribution obtained by permuting the labels of the two groups.

As such it appears as a general method for comparing the local intensity of two non-stationary spatial point processes. The method is applied on data from thermal pain studies where "hot pain" and "cold pain" form the two groups.