Hello,
I am running Freesurfer version 5.3.0 with the FLAIR surface refinement
bbregister patch installed. I have recently encountered a problem with
applying pial edits concurrently with the option of surface adjustment
using T2 FLAIR scans during recon-all. After initially running recon-all
with the FLAIR option flags:
'recon-all -subjid <subj> -all -FLAIR <flair_scan.mgz> -FLAIRpial'
I had tried to apply pial edits without the -FLAIRpial flag on the 2nd
recon assuming the adjustments would carry over.:
'recon-all -subjid <subj> -autorecon-pial'
This did not work out and the surfaces were worse than before as T2
adjustments were not applied. I then reran the same command adding the
-FLAIRpial option:
'recon-all -subjid <subj> -autorecon-pial -FLAIRpial'
Although the surfaces were better due to the T2 adjustment and similar to
the initial recon, recon-all did not apply any of the pial edits. This was
odd because other scans that required control points (with '-autorecon2-cp
-autorecon3') or white matter edits (with 'autorecon2-wm -autorecon3') did
apply all manual edits, including adjusting the pial surfaces for deleted
voxels and refining by the T2 scans.
After some detective work looking into the log file and recon-all code, I
think I may have found the problem. Turns out, just in the case of pial
edits, the ?h.woFLAIR.pial files are not being re-written to reflect the
new surfaces correcting for edited voxels following the "Make Pial Surf"
step. This is noted in the date stamp of the ?h.woFLAIR.pial files being
older than all other surface files following the last recon-all procedure.
This is likely because the ?h.pial output files from the "Make Pial Surf"
are being overwritten by the "Refine Pial Surfs w/ T2/FLAIR" procedure,
instead of being copied over to the ?h.woFLAIR.pial files which are the
input to the FLAIR adjustment, and would thus carry on the pial edits. Here
is the recon-all code:
set nv1=(`mris_info $sdir/${hemi}.pial |& grep nvertices`)
set nv2=(`mris_info $sdir/${hemi}.wo${t2flair}.pial |& grep nvertices`)
if ( (! -e $sdir/${hemi}.wo${t2flair}.pial) || \
("$nv1" != "$nv2") ) then
set cmd = (cp -v $sdir/${hemi}.pial $sdir/${hemi}.wo${t2flair}.pial)
I have attached the log file for one of my subjids that had this issue
(Note, the 10/20/15 recon-all is after installing the patch due to the
bbregister issues, and the last recon-all on 12/2/15 I tried starting the
stream earlier with the -autorecon2-wm flag just to see if that would
help).
I think it would help to just copy the ?h.pial to ?h.woFLAIR.pial
regardless of nvertices being the same. Please let me know if I can provide
any more information!
Thank you for your time and support!
Victoria J. Williams, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
VA Boston Healthcare System Jamaica Plain
Neuroimaging Research for Veterans Center (NeRVe)
Memory Disorders Research Center
150 South Huntington Ave D11-102
Boston, MA 02130