Hi Cheol,
I am using freesurfer for patients with various neural disease. I wonder the the freesurfer atlas is applicable to them: dementia (with Lewy bodies, DLB), epilepsy, schizophrenia, ADHD, Alzheimer, stroke. (I know some studies already used freesurfer for some of the diseases in the list,) I believe epilepsy patients with lobectomy cannot be applicable.
If the malformation or the difference between normal control acquisitions and your scans is significant the FS pipeline, using the FS atlas is not going to be successful. Withuot seeing your data I cannot tell which population from the above is going to be affected, but if in doubt just try processing one or two representative samples from the different populations and assess how successful the processing is.
Also is there age limit for the freesurfer atlas? How young can the atlas work for? 4 year-old? 6 year-old? or more than 10 year-old? How about the upper bound? 80 year-old?
The lower bound, in our experience, is about 4-5 yrs. Of course, it depends on your data quality but we had success all the way down to that age. I am not aware of any upper limits. Again, if you are processing these kind of "extreme" populations, make sure that you inspect the outcome of the FS recon pipeline carefully before proceeding with any type of analysis.
Lilla