  In recent years there has been explosive growth in the number of neuroimaging
studies performed using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). The field
that has grown around the acquisition and analysis of fMRI data is
intrinsically interdisciplinary in nature and involves contributions from
researchers in neuroscience, psychology, physics and statistics, among others.
A standard fMRI study gives rise to massive amounts of noisy data with a
complicated spatio-temporal correlation structure. Statistics plays a crucial
role in understanding the nature of the data and obtaining relevant results
that can be used and interpreted by neuroscientists. In this paper we discuss
the analysis of fMRI data, from the initial acquisition of the raw data to its
use in locating brain activity, making inference about brain connectivity and
predictions about psychological or disease states. Along the way, we illustrate
interesting and important issues where statistics already plays a crucial role.
We also seek to illustrate areas where statistics has perhaps been
underutilized and will have an increased role in the future.
