Hi Martin,
Not to belabor this topic but one of the major advantages in using Freesurfer is that for an individual subject, you can ascertain what the individual volume/thickness is of specific neuroanatomic areas. Clinically, this information is of significant importance as you can then detail whether atrophy in specific regions is predictive of a clinical endpoint (e.g diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease) or how atrophy in specific regions progresses over time (e.g. longitudinal anatomic change within a specific individual). To the best of my knowledge, SPM/VBM only allows for group comparisons, not indidividual subject morphometric information, and does not allow you to either predict or longitudinally track morphometric changes in a single individual.
Hope this helps,
Rahul -- Rahul S. Desikan rahul@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu
Gentlemen,
I am giving a lecture about aging brain. I only discuss freesurfer, since that's the method we use for the brain volume and cortical thickness assessment. There are other methods, such as VBM and SIENA potentially providing similar information. I would appreciate if you could point me to a reference, which compares features of Freesurfer and VBM, or if you could provide me your insight on what are the advantages of FreeSurfer over VBM.
I could think of the following:
Freesurfer allowes for the subvoxel precision of the volume estimation
VBM involves strong filtering in order to suppress variations of
individual anatomies
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Thanks a lot in advance.
Martin _______________________________________________ Freesurfer mailing list Freesurfer@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu https://mail.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/freesurfer