Dear Joaquim and experts,

Thank you for developing this wonderful toolbox. I have a question about doing ROI analysis in SDM. I am interested in comparing & plotting pre scans with post scans among 6 studies. So I set up one model for pre scans and one model for post scanes. Then I extracted data from several masks. I found there are actually three columns of data: estimates, variance and sdm_z for each study and three model contrasts (MyMean, MyMean_QH and MyMean_I2). My first question is what are those values?

For the comparison between pre scans and post scans, should I use paired T test with per study estimates or directly compare between sdm_z for MyMean for pre scans and MyMean for post scans?

Looking forward to your answer. Thanks in advance.

Dear Feng Xue,

I think that the cell you are interested is "MyMean" / "estimate". The other two rows are estimates of the heterogeneity (Q and I2), and the other two columns are the mean of the variances and z-values of the estimates.

That said, I would like to add that these figures may be interesting for plotting purposes, but to conduct a test I would suggest to meta-analyze the six paired t-test maps.

Best wishes,

Joaquim