Dear all,
There seem to be some serious issues with the T2pial / FLAIRpial processing
options provided in the latest versions of FreeSurfer.
First of all, although not clearly documented, T2pial / FLAIRpial
processing does require the FSLDIR to be set (in order to use bbregister
with --init-fsl). If not set, recon-all will finish just without using the
T2 or FLAIR information. Importantly, no clear warning about this is given
although the user expects that T2/FLAIR has been used for pial surface
refinement. I think this is a very easy source of errors, so it might be a
good idea to just throw an error when FSLDIR is missing and
T2pial/FLAIRpial processing is requested.
Second, if FSLDIR has been set. T2pial/FLAIRpial uses bbregister with FLIRT
initialisation to align the T2 or FLAIR image to orig.mgz. However, we have
some high-res 3DFLAIR data in which this registration (more specifially,
the FLIRT initialisation step of bbregister) seems to fail in more than
half of the cases. Apparently, the FSL initialisation is not capable to
change the orientation such that it fits to the coordinate system used for
orig.mgz. Again, no warning or error is thrown, but the processing just
continues with the wrong registration and without noticing the results will
get worse compared to not using T2 or FLAIR.
Although I know its essential to look at the output data; would it be
possible to put some effort in letting the user know that things got wrong?
As a sidenote; I tried to fix this registration issue, but it seems to be
very complicated using bbregister (other than just inserting my own
registration obtained by using FLIRT to register native FLAIR to native T1,
and subsequently transform the result to Freesurfer space in order to
obtain FLAIR.mgz).
Best,
Martijn