Dear experts,
I've been working on resting state data using dual regression, and have several questions with results. I've tried to find (and post) threads in both FSL forum and google about those but fail to get clear answers about it. I would appreciate any insights for my questions.
So far, what I did was that,
1) Ran concat ICA and did template matching procedure.
2) Successfully identified RSN components (DMN, FPN, ECN ... )
3) Fed "mean_IC.nii.gz" into dual regression process
4) Got individually estimated time-series files (stage1) and zmap (stage2)
At this point, my questions are
1) When I feed "mean_IC.nii.gz" into dual regression, I wondered it is okay to threshold the mean_IC.nii.gz with a certain z (or p) value. It seems that dual regression is using just whole component activities (instead of restricted activities at a certain threshold), and therefore individual time-course was estimated from broader boundaries of component. So I thought that if I constrained the group component map for dual regression (with a higher threshold), then the final estimated time-course would be more specific within the network component.
2) Instead of conducting group-level analysis in dual regression to see group differences (stage 3), I would like to estimate the connectivity strength, at the individual level, between one of RSN components and the other structural region of interest. For example, I want to see how much individual DMN component (stage 2) is strongly connected to the their amygdala activity. This is basically I want to use the connectivity strength as individual index or difference values. In this case, I wondered whether it is okay to extract mean signals from individual component z-map (stage 2) with several structural ROI masks, and consider it as individual functional connectivity strength between RSNs and ROIs.
A few days ago, I also posted another question regarding group-ICA, but I've not yet heard anything. I would appreciate if you have a chance to look at my previous question as well. Here's the link.
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind1512&L=FSL&F=&S=&X=5D55B9561D691C1EDD&Y=taehol%40usc.edu&P=70713
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