Hi Ged,

Yes, for the FCP-1000 analysis we removed the first 5 timepoints of every scan (regardles of whether we had information about that from each site). We choose this option as it gave us ease of use and certainty that we allowed magnetization stabilization in every dataset (some datasets might have more removed, but that is ok).

For the TRT data we did not do this. The number of volumes of the scan is 197. However, if I remember correctly there were indeed 4 dummy volumes collected with that sequence. Those volumes were automatically discarded by the scanner and not considered during the reconstruction. So you can safely use all 197 volumes (as was done in the paper that reports on the TRT data http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19221144).

Cheers,
Maarten