Greetings,

I read some of the discussions on CONN Discussion forum on how to perform longitudinal analysis in CONN, particulalry when two time-points are separated by several months/years. It's recommended to either to use those time-points as individual subjects or use 1st structural scan in structural set up and all the functional scans at seperate sessions within the subject.

I was wondering if there is more sophisticated approach available something like FreeSurfer used for longitudinal analysis: https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswik... by creating a unbiased subject template/base (i.e., wihtin subject template) and then performing the longitudinal analysis based on a common template. If so, could you provide detailed instructions regarding the same?

On the other hand, if it does not matter for fMRI analysis, then I would prefer using separate sessions (collected a year apart) as individual subjects (i.e., 10 subjects with each subject having 3 sessions - I would consider as 30 individuals subjects [10x3]). In that case, can I consider final preprocessed images (i.e., smoothed images) from each session (i.e., total 30 smoothed files) also as individual subjects for further processing (outside CONN)?

I would greatly appreciate any help.

Thanks,
M