Dear Christian,
Can you clear something up for me? My questions are a little naive due to confusion......
I'm trying to understand what aspect(s) of DARTEL are incorporated into VBM8...if a pre-existing DARTEL-made template is provided (in MNI space), how are you using the DARTEL algorithm? My understanding of DARTEL is that its core functionality is in creating the group-specfic template with equidistant (as far as possible) transforms from each subject to the template but if the template is already provided then all there is to do is calculate the warps to this template...is this done using a high-dimensional warp that is specific to DARTEL (is this Run DARTEL (existing templates?)? Could you not simply use the high dimensional warp utility with your DARTEL-made template? Would this be better? Does using a pre-exisiting template adequately fulfill the minimal distance objective of DARTEL? Is a template made of healthy controls suitable for highly atrophied brains such as those of dementia populations? Another core function of DARTEL is the simultaneous warping and smoothing - can this not be incorporated? I guess it would need a template not in MNI space and then use of the DARTEL norm to MNI function.
Richard
