Dear experts,

Thanks for your discussion.
For the way 1), I'm wondering whether I understand your discussion correctly.

If I have 6 subjects (including 3 healthy controls and 3 patients) and several covariates (e.g. age and gender), I have the following 2nd-level covariates:

HC: [1 1 1 0 0 0]
Patient: [0 0 0 1 1 1]
Age: [22 23 24 21 24 25] (after orthogonalizing to all subjects, it's [-1.167 -0.167 0.833 -2.167 0.833 1.833])
Gender: [1 0 1 0 1 1] (1 for male and 0 for female)


Then, I want to remove one patient (the last patient) from the analysis, so I add new covariates.

HC_new: [1 1 1 0 0 0]
Patient_new: [0 0 0 1 1 0]
Age_new: [22 23 24 21 24 0] (after orthogonalizing to all remained subjects, it's [-0.8 0.2 1.2 -1.8 1.2 0])
Gender: [1 0 1 0 1 0]

For comparing differences between HC and Patients after controlling for the effect of age and gender, I select these 4 new covariates and input [-1 1 0 0] as the vector for between-subject contrast.

Is the result as the same if I create a new project only including the first 5 subjects?

Thanks.

Best,
Chih-Hao Lien