Not exactly a Brainstorm question, but thus far, I have been using CAT12 with Brainstorm for segmenting of individual participants' T1s. During this process, I have also been using the "import cortical thickness maps" options.
Out of curiosity, I am interested in exploring cortical thickness measures for my research question along with my EEG data. For the cortical thickness maps in my BST protocol, if I was to export these (using scouts from the DK atlas for example), would these values be okay to proceed running statistical analyses with? Or is there further processing that needs to be done with these cortical thickness maps (in SPM/CAT)?
I have no experience with these cortical thickness maps. I can't tell how the values you see when displaying them in Brainstorm relate with real physiological measurements.
I've added them into Brainstorm because they were created by CAT12, and thought that some day it might be useful for someone.
No matter what these files contain, I think you should be able to use the non-parametric tests in Brainstorm in order to compare the cortical thickness of two populations.
Maybe there are additional pre-processing steps (e.g. applying a log) that would help obtain significant/meaningful results. You should ask this to the CAT12/SPM12 community.
There is no additional preprocessing needed. There exist a ROI option to extract atlas-defined values as csv file in CAT12:
CAT12->ROI Tools->Estimate mean value inside ROI for external analysis
Furthermore, the CAt12 manual describes how to make a surface-based analysis at the vertex level: https://neuro-jena.github.io/cat12-help/#stat_options
Just to double check then, would the extraction of cortical thickness values from scouts (e.g., DK atlas) within Brainstorm be okay then? Or would you suggest the values from ROIs be obtained from within CAT12 as you described?
@pdhami
If the DK atlas in Brainstorm is using the same (Freesurfer) space that I use in CAt12 this should work. However, I have to admit that I never tried that in Brainstorm and you should double-check whether the results are the same for both approaches.