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Hi Freesurfers,
We are collaborating with a group at Michigan that planss to use
Freesurfer's longitudinal pipeline to process T1 data collected from
children (see brief project summary below) at multiple time points. Our
role is to oversee recon QA and application of a custom cortical
parcellation labeling system. As we move to longitudinal processing, we
have a couple questions about when/how/if to apply various custom templates
that we're using.
In preparing the cross-sectional recons, we used a custom tal atlas
generated from our sample with help from Avi Snyder.
Question 1: When creating the base or running longitudinal processing,
should this atlas be specified in some manner?
We also generated a custom pediatric surface template and cortical
classifier; we co-register each subject to this template and apply the
classifier (we actually just use surf2surf to map the labeled template to
the individual subject surfaces) to generate cortical labels.
Question 2: how should we do this in the longitudinal stream? would we
register the subject's base to the pediatric surface template then use the
the resulting sphere.reg in the call to mris_ca_label?
In the longitudinal work flow, it looks like cortical labeling is done in
the longitudinal stream.
Question 3: If we notice a labeling error and correct it, is there a means
of propagating that correction across all the time points?
Question 4: If we've labeled and reviewed all the cross-sectional
time-point-one data, is there a way to map those labels to the longitudinal
stream time points that doesn't compromise the resulting labels?
Question 5: Given the project summary below, are there any other concerns
that we should be aware of when applying the longitudinal pipeline?
*Brief summary of the longitudinal study of childhood stuttering at
University of Michigan (Soo-Eun Chang)*
Over the last few years, we have collected yearly structural and functional
MRI scans from around 300 children who do and do not stutter. These are
children between the ages of 3-10 at initial scan. Scans were acquired each
year for up to 4 years (some children do not have all 4 years, but many
do). Data from year 1 has been published (Garnett et al., 2018) using a
custom labeling system and atlas. We have just finished manual editing of
the scans from years 2 – 4 and are preparing to conduct a longitudinal
analysis with all 4 years of scans in FreeSurfer.
We plan to extract cortical and subcortical measures of thickness, area,
volume, LGI, etc. and compare developmental trajectories of these measures
in the stuttering group vs. the control group. Also, because of the
longitudinal design, we have information on whether children in the
stuttering group went on to recover or if their stuttering persisted. All
children were considered stuttering at their initial visit, and based on
evaluations each year, we are able to retrospectively assign them to the
persistent group or the recovered group. In this way, in addition to
comparing morphometric measures between children who stutter and controls,
we also hope to find neural markers that help predict persistence vs.
recovery in childhood stuttering.
Many thanks for your input.
Jason
--
Jason A. Tourville, Ph.D.
Research Assistant Professor
Department of Speech, Language,
and Hearing Sciences
Boston University
677 Beacon St.
Boston, MA 02215
Phone: (617)353-9484
Fax: (617)353-7755