Hello all,
We are doing studies correlating neuropsychological measures of executive function in normal and clinical populations, epilepsy and sickle cell disease. I am looking at the issue of the amount of time allowed between acquiring the volumetric MR and performing the battery of neuropsych tests. We are working with pediatrics, 10 to 18 years and the frontal areas that are thought to be most correlated with executive function are also developing during this age span. Also there is quite limited knowledge from previous imaging studies of the growth curves for these regions. Since we are dealing also with clinical populations for which even less information is available concerning their deviation from normal growth curves( intractable partial focal epilepsies thought to be of frontal lobe onset )
Therefore I was thinking the imaging and testing should be less than one month apart, and perhaps 2 months would be absolutely two long. Since we are working with clinical populations it is not possible to always control the schedules so closely, our normal control populations have their imaging and neuro psych battery never more than a week apart. I would be pleased if one of the freesurfer PI's would give me their impression as to what they would find acceptable if they were reviewing a paper so I could have a second( higher ) opinion to back up the rules I have made for our studies.
thanks
Greg