PET neuroimaging: The elephant unpacks his trunk Comment on Cumming: 'PET neuroimaging: The white elephant packs his trunk?'

摘要

In a recent Neurolmage commentary Paul Cumming uses biomedical literature data to make inferences about the scientific future of brain PET (Cumming, 2013). Using the search terms PET, fMRI, and Brain in PubMed, Cumming attempts to analyse the broader historical trends of brain PET imaging. Significant scepticism should be maintained at the use of crude measures, such as total publication number, to infer the value of a particular scientific field. Nevertheless, such methodology can provide a rough estimate of a scientific field's general activity (where to paraphrase Sir Humphrey Appleby1 "activity can serve as a substitute for achievement").An initial examination of the data presented drew our attention to some obvious errors. For example the graph presented in the original commentary (Fig. 1) shows a large number of fMRI neuroimaging papers published in the early 1980s. To our knowledge the first human fMRI papers were published in 1992. In addition, the number of PET neuroimaging papers that the graph claims were published in 2012 is too low. Indeed, our group at Imanova, alone published a number of PET neuroimaging papers in 2012 similar to that indicated for the field as a whole. Whilst having a naturally high regard for our own work, we believe that others are successfully publishing in this field too.