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. The method is applied on data from thermal pain studies where “hot pain” and “cold pain” form the two groups.