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Dear SPMers,

I came across several oddities in my m0wc1*.nii (modulated, normalized, gray
matter) images yesterday, and I am hoping someone here can shed some light
on the situation.  Apologies for the length of this correspondence, but I
wanted to be precise in explaining the problem observed.  

Anyways, looking at a typical m0wc1*.nii image, the voxel values have the
following strange properties:

1) There are no voxels with a value greater than 1
2) There are ~580,000 voxels with a value of exactly 1.  Actually, they all
have a value of exactly 1.000000059138983, which in itself is kind of strange.
3) Of the non-zero valued voxels in the m0wc1*.nii image, 42.4% of them are
exactly (to double precision) the same as in the wc1*.nii images.

In a previous thread, Dr. Ashburner said that 

> The contents of a modulated image are a voxel compression map multiplied
by tissue belonging 
> probabilities (which range between zero and one)
> ...
> The total volume of grey matter in the original image can be
> determined by summing the voxels in the modulated, spatially
> normalised image and multiplying by the voxel volume (product of voxel
> size).

That the total volume of gray matter in the original image can be determined
by integration implies conservation of probability of gray matter.  It
follows that the voxel compression map would have values >1 in areas where
there has been positive compression (shrinking) and values <1 in areas where
there has been negative compression (expansion).  With this in mind, the
properties described above lead me to the following conclusions:

A) There are no voxels with high probability (p~1.0) of being gray matter
that were positively compressed (shrunk) in normalizing, else there would
exist modulated voxels with value > 1.
B) There exist several voxels that either i) had a gray matter probability
of exactly 1 and were not compressed even one iota or ii) were compressed in
exact (to double precision!) proportion to their uncertainty of being gray
matter.  Else there would not exist modulated voxels with value = 1 exactly
C) 42.4% of probable gray matter voxels neither shrunk nor expanded in the
process of morphing to standard space.

I just can't wrap my head around any of those conclusions.  I feel like
either I'm totally misunderstanding what happens with modulation or
something is very very wrong with my images.  I understand that the
non-linear only modulation (m0 instead of m) changes things, but
substituting "non-linear compression" for "compression" above does not make
the observations any less strange.  If any guru out there can make sense of
all this, it would be much appreciated.

Regards,
Neil 

Neil Chatterjee
Research Assistant
Stanford Systems Neuroscience and Pain Lab
650-724-0522
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