Hi Eszter, 

I would always prefer LME , because it is more flexible (e.g. different spacing between time points, fixed vs random effects, easy to look at interactions etc). But not sure for your case, as we have no idea about what you even try to analyse with one group. Also we are not statisticians, which would be the right people to ask these questions. 

There is also LME in R if you don’t want to pay Matlab fees, or in python. 

Best, Martin 


On 24. Feb 2026, at 21:41, Eszter Boros <boros.eszter0226@gmail.com> wrote:
Thank you! We already smoothed the data with -qcash, so we will skip this step. 
Would rm-anova work for publication purposes? Or just for exploration, and LME in Matlab would be the preferred method. 

Thank you!

Best regards,
Eszter

Douglas N. Greve <dgreve@mgh.harvard.edu> ezt írta (időpont: 2026. febr. 23., H, 22:07):
smoothing decisions won't rely on whether the analysis is an rm-anova or something else. how much to smooth depends on a lot of things, eg, the spatial structure of your contrast of interest

On 2/19/2026 3:06 PM, Eszter Boros wrote:


Thank you for the prompt reply!
Should I spatially smooth as part of the RepeatedMeasuresAnova? I saw that it is optional. But I wonder why.  
I already used -qcach as part of recon-all. So I do not need anything from this script and I can skip it, right?
mri_surf2surf --s fsaverage --hemi lh --fwhm 5\ --sval lh.thickness.mgh \ --tval lh.thickness.sm05.mgh

Also, we were considering LME in Matlab as well before reading your response about RepeatedMeasuresAnova.
Do you think that is "good enough" for publication purposes? Or LME is the preferred method. 

Thank you!

Best regards,
Eszter




Douglas N. Greve <dgreve@mgh.harvard.edu> ezt írta (időpont: 2026. febr. 13., P, 17:58):
The first one is a more complicated model that includes a mixed effects design. Harder to set up.
The second is a paired ttest; this is simple and  good if you only have two time points.
For three time points I would use https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/RepeatedMeasuresAnova



On 2/13/2026 1:22 PM, Eszter Boros wrote:

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Dear FreeSurfer Team,

We are trying to run some longitudinal data using FreeSurfer 7.4.1.
We have one group and 3 scans. We would like to see the changes between these timepoints. 
I am not sure how to proceed with the GLM because I found two tutorials.

One here is saying I should create a longitudinal qdec table including fsid-base column and years/timepoints then run mri_glmfit --osgm

The other one is saying to do a paired analysis. This one does not include the base and years data. 

How should I proceed?
Thank you!

Best regards,
Eszter



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