<div dir="ltr">Dear hubs,<div><br></div><div>I am posting on this list regarding one of the brainhack 2013 (ongoing) project: quality control (QC) of processed rs-fMRI. I just heard a terrific talk from Frissoni, and I think what we would want is something like that:</div>
<div><a href="http://www.hippocampal-protocol.net/SOPs/index.php">http://www.hippocampal-protocol.net/SOPs/index.php</a></div><div><br></div><div>Basically </div><div>(1) set up a QC form, </div><div>(2) get a panel of experts to use it on a large database, </div>
<div>(3) get them to discuss conflicts, </div><div>(4) loop until you reach a consensus with more directions on QC choices (and possibly new QC metrics as well), which you document in a painfully detailed operations manual. </div>
<div>(5) Then you get an online interface were "naive" people who just read the manual are presented with test cases to train and eventually certify that people get it (when they reach a good-enough score). </div>
<div>(6) you grade intra-inter-rater consistency for naive raters that got through the certification to check that it actually works. </div><div>(7) Finally, you test what is the effect of QC on a number of analysis, to check if it does impact the results (and that it was worth doing all of that).</div>
<div><br></div><div>Frissoni, Duchesnes and coll. have done something like that for hippocampus segmentation instead of QC, and I think this is a really good way to help standardize the production of imaging outcomes. For the QC, the same approach could work for a variety of packages, as NIAK/DSPARF/CPAC and others have a lot of the operations in common, just using different tools. Results of QC would actually be a great way to compare the accuracy/robustness of different pipelines (one of the main things we have examined so far is coregistration T1->stereotaxic and T1->BOLD). </div>
<div><br></div><div>We have started working on this project with a PhD student, Yassine Benhajali, in collaboration with some folks at NYU (Cameron Craddock, Chao Gan Yang, Qingyang Li) as well as Maarten Mennes. This initiative started at brainhack2012, and has been an important component of the "ABIDE preprocessed" release (yet-to-come ... but getting there ...). Yassine has drafted an operation manual that he is revising, and we have a number of metrics that could be used in the first round of the panel. So we kind of went through 1-4 once, and we should get a preliminary idea on 7 soon, while preparing the "ABIDE preprocessed" paper.</div>
<div><br></div><div>What we need to do next is to get an actual QC report form going (we just agreed loosely on what to look at for now), ideally web-based, and update the operation manual. And hopefully build the panel, select a dataset (which is likely going to remain ABIDE ...) and go through one or more iteration. If anybody is interested to be part of that, please get in touch. I am going to post a project description on <a href="http://brainhack.org">brainhack.org</a>, but I prefer to start first with an email on this list in case I get some good feedback for the project description. </div>
<div><br></div><div>Sorry about the long post. Best,</div><div><br clear="all"><div>Pierre<br></div>
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