Some cerebellar DTI scans are complete while others are incomplete. Will this affect the cerebral FBA analysis?
Hi qianjinbo-creat,
I would say it will not affect your ability to perform statistical inference in the cerebral area. However, your case versus having all the scans with complete cerebellum may yield a different FBA outcome in terms of corrected p-values (including cerebral fixels). That is because fixel-fixel connectivity is assessed within the whole fixel mask, and leveraged for statistical enhancement within a permutation testing framework.
Also, you may want to deal with the fact that some of your DWI data do not include the whole cerebellum and consider using either -mask or -posthoc option when running the fixelcfestats command to exclude the cerebellum entirely from either processing or statistical inference.
Simone
Just to add. In processing your data for fixel analysis, at some point, you would compute a “template mask”, which is the intersection of all subject masks in template space. This would deal with the varying brain coverage. Cheers, William