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Hi all,
I've been working on a project that involves the thalamic segmentation pipeline published by Iglesias et al. in 2018 in NeuroImage ("segmentThalamicNueclei.sh"). While the pipeline itself works great, we have noticed that the right hemisphere VOIs tend to have slightly larger volumes than the left hemisphere VOIs. This has been true in two separate datasets (n=24 and n=25), neither of which has an obvious physiological trait that would lead us to expect these sorts of hemisphere differences.
This is my first time posting a question on this list, so I'm not sure if images are OK. If yes, there are a couple posted at the bottom of this message that should visualize what I'm talking about. If not, I can say that the volume differences are most pronounced in the largest VOIs (PuM, VPL, VLp, etc); in these regions, the right side is ~200-300 cmm larger than the left side. Additionally, the average volumes on both sides are reasonable based on Figure 8 of Iglesias et al (in the sense that our average volumes are well within the violin plots in that figure).
I'm wondering if anyone has encountered this trend before, and/or if there's a correction I might implement to equalize the volumes. We want to be understand-to the extent possible-the extent to which these differences are driven by biology vs image processing.
Thanks so much, Evan
Images follow:
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