Dear SPMers,
for some reason (without going into the details) I find myself with the luxury of having 2 back-to-back acquired (in one session) structural scans (MPRAGES) on a 1.5T scanner. Our study sample was comprised of 4 different groups (2 patient, 2 control). I am now wondering how to exploit this unusual situation. We used the ADNI protocol and they suggest that one option could be to combine both images (after spatial registration) and thus increase SNR. Thus, one option would be to do this and then conduct a VBM analysis and simply compare the 4 groups. But, one silly question, are 2 combined 1.5T as good (or better) than one 3T scan?
However, I am wondering if people out there also have some other ideas/suggestions. I thought of using one of the two scans, do the VBM and then use it to see whether we can predict which group the person belongs to in the second anatomical. I have seen papers do this functionally so I have no idea whether this approach would make sense for structural analysis or not and would appreciate any advice on this. Third, are there other options/possibilities of what could be done with such data?
Many thanks in advance for any suggestions,
Sven
|