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Hi all, I have some questions regarding failed segmentations on
longitudinal data.

We have large datasets of Huntington's disease with data collected
longitudinally for 3-10 years. Freesurfer is our main tool to extract
volumetric scores, particularly in caudate and putamen.

I usually QC Freesurfer segmentations and include the fail/pass status for
other researchers to use. I inspect the segmentation of the cross-sectional
pipeline because I noticed that mis-segmentations are clearer and the
longitudinal pipeline does not seem to correct them. For example, a
displaced putamen segmentation in cross-sectional pipeline becomes just
more fuzzy in the longitudinal pipeline with more peppered voxels at the
edges. So basically, my QC of the cross-sectional segmentation decides if
the timepoint is good or not.


I have three questions:
1. Is my understanding correct that a motion corrupted scan (i.e., with
motion rings) is going to affect the other timepoints by compromising the
SST? Thus the only solution would be to exclude the motion
corrupt timepoint from FS processing? And in case the timepoint has been
processed with FS, is the best practice to exclude the entire subject given
that the bad scan have compromised the accuracy of other timepoint
segmentations?
2. On a different scneario, if a timepoint has a good scan but
Freesurfer's segmentation is  simply innacurate or displaced, is this bad
segmentation at the cross-sectional level going to affect the other
timepoints after running the longitudinal pipeline?
3. This is the most important question: is there a common recommendation or
practice how to deal with failed segmentations in the longitudinal
pipeline? Correcting manually the segmentations is not an option, so I am
asking whether we can just exclude the failed segmentation timepoint from
the analysis or whether we should exclude the entire subject?

Thank you for sharing any thoughts. I cannot seem to find information on
this topic on papers or the mailing list, so any tips on how you or your
lab deals with these issues can help.

Dorian
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