The two methods are very different. In the method described on the thickness repeatability page, its computing a mean and stddev of the thickness for your group. This a direct and easily interpretable measure, but doesn't give you a statistical measure (but you could do that on your own with some external package).
In qdec (mri_glmfit), it would be conducting a GLM-based analysis looking for statistical significance, expressed as a p-value at each vertex, in thickness between groups. Here, raw thickness differences are hidden in the analysis.
However, you can of course do both analysis, and compare them, which I would suggest you do. You would hope the areas of change are the same. Note that you can load external surface maps, such as a thickness- diff.mgh map, onto the fsaverage surface in qdec, so that you can view both analysis (or just load the thickness-diff.mgh map in tksurfer).
Its on the list of things to add to qdec to create two-group thickness difference maps, as well as just viewing the mean group thickness, to save some work for this sort of thing.
Nick
On Fri, 2009-02-20 at 12:53 -0600, bell0368@umn.edu wrote:
All,
I am going to run an analysis of cortical thickness reproducibility; there are at least two methods that seem obvious. I could run qdec analysis with time1 and time2 as different groups or I could run the methods below. Are the commands below the same ones used in the qdec GUI? As far as I can tell, they will both give me cortical thickness differences on a vertex by vertex basis. There are probably some subtle differences in the way they are coded, but any major changes? Thanks.
http://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/ThicknessRepeatibility
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