Please see inline responses below.


On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 6:46 PM, Victoria Klimaj <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi SPM experts,

A quick question on thresholding:

For my data, I'm not using cluster-level thresholding because 
it doesn't seem to change the corrected T in SPM. If this is the case (unless I'm doing it wrong), there doesn't seem to be any justification for using cluster level thresholding and ignoring even a single significant voxel.

The voxel T-statistics and corrected voxel T-statistics are not influenced by clustering. You want to use cluster thresholding because you can make inferences on the clusters and people don't believe that single voxels are active because you likely started with larger voxels and have smoothed your data.
 

W
hy don't people use a hierarchical approach, simultaneously implementing different corrections for different sized clusters?

I'd take a look at TFCE in FSL, its close to what you are suggesting.
 
Using something like this, a single voxel would have the most stringent requirements, and each additional voxel would lower the required T (as determined by Monte Carlo simulation or some such thing?). I'm not a statistics expert, but it seems like this would be a very effective default procedure. Is there any way of utilizing this kind of thresholding in SPM?

In one of my earlier papers, we used several voxel height and extent thresholds and selected voxels that were included in any of them. Look for papers by Burton and McLaren. A few people raised questions about whether using multiple thresholds increased the false positive rate beyond 5% because of the multiple corrections. I don't have a good answer for that question. In the extreme case, where you have 1 voxel with a height requirement, then 2 voxels with a different height requirement, etc. This is an interesting concept that I've thought about myself; however, it would be time consuming to run all possible permutations. The idea behind TFCE is to account for the height an extent criteria at the same time and only do the thresholding once. I believe TFCE requires non-parametric testing though, so it has to be implemented through randomise. I think someone may have implemented in SPM as well, but I'm not entirely sure.
 


Thanks so much for any help!
-Victoria