Hi Anton,

Fantastic! Thank you so much for your quick response. Could you help me with a small thing regarding the number of threads? I'm running the Mean portion in the terminal (on a Linux machine). I have successfully run the preprocessing. I changed the number of threads in the sdmpsi_params.xml from 0 to 8. Somehow the terminal still displays "using 1 threads". Did I do something incorrectly? I ended up running the command in the GUI and it does use 7 threads.

Another thing is that the covariates accept both numeric and text values, is this correct? For instance, I have average age as one of the numeric covariates and smoothing parameters (e.g., 6mm, 8mm) entered as a text input.

** EDIT **

I was able to run the Mean analysis with 4 covariates. The results look different from the one without accounting for the covariates. My question is: what does including the covariates actually do? I was under the impression that it would ensure the effects of any of the covariates are removed (e.g., in the case of age as the covariate then the results would have the age effect regressed out and thus control for the age effect). Could you please let me know whether I am correct or mistaken here?

A related question is that I've looked at several studies using SDM and they all seem to have used meta-regression to examine the effects of their covariates but none appears to include the covariates as part of the main analysis. Is there a theoretical reason for this?


Alex