bottom line is can we trust freesurfer cortical thickness results and a recent paper my group published seems to give very strong positive answer to the question.
paper - cortical thinning in psychopathy, it's on the wiki publication list. All of the areas reported overlap with the areas that have been found in a number of other reports of different modalities in psychopathy,but freesurfer found them all in one dataset,recent high quality publication from kings college on psychopathy ( spm-vbm) found all the same areas except bilateral face and hand motor area ( the exact face and hand areas bilaterally that are associated with emotional binding), i would think the chances of getting this by random error are astronomically low!!!). The ```LEFT``` anterior insula and ```LEFT``` caudal anterior cingulate, again exactly the areas that are consistantly nailed in seperate studies of empathy and they are thinned in psychopaths. the spatial specificity ( the ability to look at the surfaces and tell exactly where the differences are is vastly superior in our freesurfer paper.
and this is a study with a group that is not grossly sick, so smaller differences would be expected than a neurodegenerative disease for example. only heuristic validation but my studies with freesurfer always find areas that make sense. the exact value of the cortical thickness are not as important it's the statistical differences in a consitantly processed ( same everything, version etc. ) study
well done Bruce & company, i know which software i am using for structural analysis, *freesurfer*
my 2 cents
Greg Kirk University of Wisconsin Madison
On 06/20/12, Nick Schmansky wrote:
Peter,
Thanks for this info. The Mac OS versions compared in the paper were 10.5 and 10.6 (Leopard and Snow Leopard). One of the major changes between these two versions was the switch from a 32b kernel to a 64b kernel (whereas Snow Leopard and Lion both use a 64b kernel). I havent been able to definitely say that the math libs changed, but it would seem to account for the differences in Mac OS version results in the paper. A 32b build of freesurfer (for the Mac) was used in both tests so kernel differences might not matter but are suspect.
Nick
We run things on an Xgrid cluster that is now a mixture of Macs running Snow Leopard (10.6.8) and Lion (10.7.x). We found the results given from asegstats2table and aparcstats2table are identical after running 100 subjects on both Mac OS X 10.7.4 and 10.6.8 with Freesurfer 5.1. I also ran a few subjects on the cluster and on individual computers (not on the cluster so to speak) and the results are identical.
Best, Peter
Hi,
The paper entitled
“The Effects of FreeSurfer Version, Workstation Type, and Macintosh Operating System Version on Anatomical Volume and Cortical Thickness Measurements”, PLoSONE, Vol 7(6), e38234 (2012)
may be of interest to all of you. It can be found at:
http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0038234
Cheers, Ed
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Gregory Kirk