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Dear SPM list

*Problem in short:*

We have encountered a curious problem regarding our MEG source 
localisation procedure.
In short, the inverted model returned consists only of NaN's when we run 
group inversion based on the gradiometers. However, it works fine for 
the magnetometers. See general information and detailed description of 
the problem below:

*General information about the experiment:*

14 subjects
Scanned with Elekta equipment (magnetometers _and_ gradiometers)
ICA applied, eye blink and heart rate components have been removed.
306 channels, 326 samples (250 Hz), and 6 conditions.
SPM-version used: SPM8, revision number 4667 in MATLAB 2011
Preprocessing: bandpass filtered 0.5 Hz - 15 Hz, epoched (-200 ms - 1100 
ms), robust averaging on each condition, and finally bandpass filter 
again to remove artefacts induced by robust averaging. Conditions have 
been sorted such that D.condlist for each subject is '0', '1', '2', '3', 
'4', '5'.
Individual MR-scans obtained for each subject and co-registered to the 
SPM-template.
New fiducials registered and saved for each subject based on 
co-registered MR-image.


*Observations concerning the problem:*
Source localisation runs as expected, for all subjects, when only 
magnetometers are used. This is not the case for gradiometers. According 
to our preliminary tests, NaN's are returned whenever we include more 
than 8 subjects in our group inversion. It seems to be independent of 
whether or not ICA has been applied or not. Furthermore, we have tested 
whether it could  be a single subject that caused NaN's to be returned, 
but it doesn't seem like it.

NaN's returned            Subjects included in source localisation after 
having excluded ICA-dependency as the problem
Yes                                 1-14  subj > 8
Yes                                 1-9    subj > 8
Yes                                 2-10  subj > 8
No                                  1-8    subj = 8
No                                  9-14 subj < 8
No                                  2-9   subj = 8

This shows that each subject can be included in a group inversion 
without NaN's being returned. It seems, however, that NaN's are returned 
whenever there are more than 8 subjects in the inversion, which we find 
a bit curious. Our tests cannot exclude that the problem stems from a 
combination of (a) certain subject(s) being included in the group 
inversion _and/or_ the number of subjects being greater than 8.

*What we further have investigated:*

We have investigated the SPM gain matrices and have observed no obvious 
correlations between successful and unsuccessful inversions (as measured 
by whether or not NaN's occur).

We have investigated whether any subject time series contain curious 
values (e.g. NaN's, inf, NA), and have found none.

We have downloaded the newest version from the SPM-website, revision 
number 4667, and tried the analysis again, where we removed all NIfTI 
and GIfTI images from earlier analyses, but with the same result.

We are open to any suggestions you might have.

Thanks in advance

Michael Nygaard Pedersen and Lau Møller Andersen

P.S. Please make sure that you send answers to the emails of both of us!