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David,

Here are some thoughts.

The reason you don't see options like you do in SPSS is that its hard to correct across space and contrasts. In SPSS, you are correcting across contrasts, but there is only 1 "voxel".

I would do the following:
(1) ANOVA with 5 groups, assess with F-test if there are any group differences.
(2) If you find group differences, then you can mask your data and do your post-hoc tests.

This will help control the error rate as you know that there is at least 1 group difference in the post-hoc tests.

The alternative of doing 5 separate tests doesn't get around the issue of multiple comparisons across comparisons.

There are people working on how to accurately do the joint correction across space and contrasts, but I'm not sure if anything has been released or published.

If you want to control across time and space, you could control across space, then use FDR or Tukey or another approach to control the tests across contrasts. This would require writing your own code and would like be confusing to the reader as each voxel would have a different threshold for being significant. For example, here are two voxels (each row represents a different comparison) corrected p-values:
0.001 0.001
0.001 0.025
0.025 0.025
0.045 0.045
0.049 0.049

If we use FDR, then the first voxel has 3 significant findings and the threshold would be 0.025, while the other voxel threshold is 0.001 and the 0.025 voxels wouldn't be significant.


Hope this helps.

Best Regards, 
Donald McLaren, PhD


On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 12:37 PM, David Hofmann <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi all,

I want to compare a value I calculated from resting state data (Regional Homogeneity) between 5 groups with different sample sizes (1 control, 4 patient groups).  I want to compare all patient groups against one (larger) control group and all patient groups with each other and I'm uncertain about some methodical issues:

Calculating a one-way ANOVA will only tell me if there is a significant difference somewhere between my groups, so I have to calculate Post-Hoc two sample t-tests to find where the effect lies. Performing multiple t-tests will inflate my type 1 error though, so an adjustement is needed. Where as SPSS for example has a few options for this, SPM doesn't seem to have implemented this.

So my questions are:

1. Is the ANOVA and Post-Hoc two sample t-test approach valid or is there an alternative?
2. How to correct for multiple comparison (e.g. Bonferroni seems too conversative and is likely to kill my effects)

Alternatively I could avoid the problem of multiple comparison by comparing all patients groups against their respective control group.This would make the two sample t-tests independent from each other but would result in smaller sample sizes of my control group (and loss of power?). But when comparing the patient groups with each other, I will still have to correct for multiple comparison.

So I'm not certain about what approach would be best suited (and maximize power) and hope for some help or recommendations.  

greetings

David