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Hello Freesurfer developers,

Recently, I have used QDEC of freesurfer 6.0.0 to examine the cortical thickness differences between two groups, and the manuscript has been submitted to a journal. One reviewer raised a question -"The manuscript stated that the right and left hemisphere were tested separately. Could the authors provide an explanation for this? I assume that testing over 68 (all ROIs) vs testing separately left and right (34 ROIs) would have an effect?" Unfornately, I don't know how to responde to this reviewer, so I would like to ask for your help. I just followed the tutorials of QDEC (http://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/FsTutorial/QdecGroupAnalysisV6.0), and I found QDEC analyses have always be done for the two hemispheres separately. So, could you please provide some perspective and citation about the validation for such design of QDEC?

Thank you in advance for your assistance,

Best regards,

Xun