Dear Ying

I don’t know where you are based – but for an in-depth look at DCM, I can recommend the SPM course we hold in London https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/course/london/ . Videos of lectures from previous years can be found at https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/course/video/ .

The screens in the DCM review are as follows.

The first few screens show the effects of each of your experimental conditions (matrix B and matrix C of the DCM neural model) and the baseline or average connectivity over experimental conditions (matrix A of the DCM neural model). These are the estimated parameters and their probabilities of being larger than zero. Personally, I do not look at the graphical plots with the colourful circles – I don’t find them helpful. To read more about the DCM model and its parameters, take a look at:

https://doi.org/10.1016/S1053-8119(03)00202-7

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.07.008

The ‘contrast of connections’ screen lets you test for a linear contrast of connection strengths. E.g. to test if the difference between connection i and another connection j is bigger than zero. To do this, you would enter 1 for connection i, -1 for connection j, and enter zero as your test statistic.

Location of regions, inputs and outputs should be self-explanatory.

Kernels displays estimated neuronal and haemodynamic impulse response functions – i.e. the response of each region to brief input. These will only be computed for regions receiving driving input (matrix C).

Best

Peter

From: SPM (Statistical Parametric Mapping) <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Liuying L.
Sent: 23 January 2019 21:02
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SPM] What do the figures outputted by spm_dcm_review mean?

Hi all,

 I need manuals with a detailed explanation of the figures outputted by spm_dcm_review. 

  We can review estimated DCM results by clicking on the 'Dynamic Casual Modeling' button on the SPM GUI firstly and choosing the 'review' action. There are many options under the drop-down list of 'review', such as 'contrast of connections' and' kernels'. When you choose one option, figures will be outputted.  

  Some of them make me very confused, especially the figures containing colorful circles and dot lines which describe the connectivity of different regions and the figures gotten by clicking the 'kernels' option. And I don't know how to use the option 'contrast of connections'. I can't find the explanation of these figures in the SPM12 manual.

What do these figures mean?

Do you know where I can find some explanation of these figures? 

Websites or any other form of learning materials will be very appreciated!

Best wishes,
Ying