Good day

 

I am writing to enquire regarding the best approach to process longitudinal data acquired across 3 time points.

 

The time points are as follows:

• Infants (2-4 weeks old) – only T2 data available for this time point
• 2-year-olds – T1 data available
• 6-year-olds – T1 data available

 

The approach I’m considering:

• run the T2 infant data through synthmorph to create T1 images and then run infant Freesurfer on the synthetic T1 images
• run Freesurfer 7.1.1 on 2-year-old data
• I have Freesurfer 7.1.1 output for the 6-year-old data
• Run the Freesurfer longitudinal pipeline across the 3 time points

 

My questions are:

• I know it is highly recommended that the same Freesurfer version be used for longitudinal processing, but this may not be possible given that our dataset includes infant data. What would happen if I ran the normal Freesurfer 7.1.1 on the infant data? Would it be reliable? If not, would it at all be possible to combine the infant Freesurfer output with the version 7.1.1. output in the longitudinal pipeline?
• I saw that the beta version of Freesurfer 8 is out and that it includes synthmorph etc. Would it be better to process all the data with this version of Freesurfer?
• When do you expect the stable release of Freesurfer 8 to come out?

 

Thank you in advance for your guidance.

 

Kind regards,

Chanelle