Hi Nadia,

the processing steps look OK.

You have several options to analyze the longitudinal data. We do not
have a single tool to do everything automatically but there are many
tools in FreeSurfer that can do the individual steps depending on what
you want to do (as there are many different statistical analyses that
people might want to do).

If you are interested in comparing e.g. the thickness: the thickness
files are in register across time within subject (in the
tp.long.base/surf directories). For 2 time points, you could compute the
difference (mris_calc ) or percent change and divide by the distance in
time (if it is different across subjects). For your case (>2 time
points) one option is to compute a single statistic per subject in a
first step (e.g. fit a slope through the 7 time points) and then compare
the slopes across groups etc. (basically run a glm for each subject and
then use mris_prepoc to register the results to some template, stack
them and run a final glm to compare groups).

A better way to deal with longitudinal data is to use Linear Mixed
Models, but for this you are on your own. You could load stuff into
matlab and setup your mixed models there or convert the data into tables
and load it into some other statistics package.

Hope that helps getting you started, 
best, Martin

On Wed, 2011-02-23 at 15:53 +0100, nadia merhoum wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I have just started to use FreeSurfer (version 4.5) and have some
> questions on the longitudinal stream:
> 
> I have started to process cross-sectionally all time points (7 tp) of
> my patients with the following script: 
> 
> recon-all–i tpidN.nii –subjid tpidN –all
> 
> Then, created an unbiased template from all time points for each
> subject and process it with recon-all with the following script:
> 
> recon-all -base <templateid> -tp <tp1id> -tp <tp2id> ... -all
> 
> and finally did the longitudinal process to all time points with the
> following script:
> 
> recon-all -long <tpNid> <templateid> -all
> 
> I would like to know if what I have been doing till this final step is
> correct or not?
> 
> Iwould like also to know how we could calculate the differences
> between tpid1.long.template and tpid2.long.template for example? And
> is there any automatic way to do so?
> 
> Thankyou for your help
> 
> Sincerely
> 
> Nadia
> 
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