Hi,
We just published a paper assesing the normalization of epileptic patients with differents normalization methods. You can take a look at the protocol that we used:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811912001115

To our small experience, the best thing is to normalize the patients pre surgery using Unified Segmentation with medium regularization and to normalize the images post surgery using again Unified Segmentation with medium regularization, but this time using cost function masking. You would probably also need to manually correct the images to the anterior commissure prior to segmentation.
I hope this helps!

2012/3/12 octavian lie <[log in to unmask]>
Dear All,
 
I am in search for an SPM-based registration protocol for intrasubject pre and post operative (resective epilepsy surgery) MRI coregistration, preferably validated. Resections are sublobar in size, MRs are done 4 months apart, there is some cortical retraction/widened ventricles seen postop. Both scans are 3T MPRAGE/T1 without contrast done on the same scanner. I am able to generate postop MR masks excluding  the resection based on a pial surface calculated with FreeSurfer, if cost function masking (Brett 2002) is needed.
I would appreciate protocols for 1) direct pre-postop registration, and/or 2) normalization of both scans to the MNI space.
 
The goal is to define the resection volume as volume of interest.
I appreciate your advice.
 
Thank you,
 
Octavian Lie,
uthscsa.



--
Pablo Ripollés Vidal
Ph.D Student
Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit http://www.brainvitge.org/
IDIBELL [Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute]
L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona, 08097,Spain