New: ROI-based group analysis program available now

The conventional whole-brain voxel-wise group analysis starts with the presumption that the neighboring voxels are unrelated in the group (as well as the individual subject) model. To compensate for the unrealistic presumption, a second step is typically required: correction for multiple testing. Such a splitting strategy can be over-penalizing and inefficient as evidenced by the difficulty of having some clusters pass the narrow funnel of FWE controllability.

If the group analysis is performed on a list of ROIs (defined through atlas, parcellation, or prior information), an alternative approach is to build one holistic model for those ROIs instead of hundreds of thousands of separate models for the voxels in the brain. Such an integrative model is more efficient (and less penalizing) since all the ROIs are treated equally in terms of effect strength without discrimination over their anatomical size.

A program called BayesianGroupAna.py is available now for running such a ROI-based group analysis. The underlying mechanism is laid out in the manuscript https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/02/20/238998. Read the help for more details:

BayesianGroupAna.py -help

Let me know if you have questions, feedback, suggestions, etc.

Update: The paper associated with the BML approach for region-based group analysis (https://rdcu.be/bhhJp) has been accepted for publication in Neuroinformatics.

I wrote another program called RBA to handle region-based analysis so that I can keep fine-tuning various modeling strategies. Check out its usage in the help:

RBA -help | less

Hi,

I just updated AFNI on my laptop and tried this command (RBA -help | less) and it failed. In fact, I can’t find any scripts named RBA or similar in my AFNI directory. Am I doing something wrong?

This is the output of afni -ver command from 5 mins ago on my computer:
Precompiled binary linux_ubuntu_16_64: Apr 25 2019 (Version AFNI_19.1.06 ‘Caligula’)

Kausar

Hi Kausar,

If you are using csh/tcsh, try running “rehash” first, or open a new terminal window.

  • rick