afni.nimh.nih.gov

Hi, Clément-

OK, I have looked at the data and I have a few thoughts:
+ the original coordinates are a bit odd-- while the anatomical and EPI overlay each other, the (x, y, z) = (0, 0, 0) location is far outside the brain; this can affect some alignment issues.
+ the EPI has fairly low contrast (not a lot of details easily seen).
+ both datasets were acquired with oblique coordinates.

So, my thoughts on this:
+ purge the obliquity information, rather than applying it for alignment, because for the anatomical-template alignment, applying the obliquity information will introduce a larger relative rotation to the template brain. Once we purge the anatomical obliquity info, then we should do the same to the EPI (so there isn't a relative rotation introduced).
+ we should put have (0, 0, 0) of each dset be somewhere in the brain-- mainly to help the anatomical-template alignment.
+ align_epi_anat.py will try to remove the skull of both the anatomical and the EPI by default; after @animal_warper, we will have a skullstripped version of the anatomical, so we should tell align_epi_anat.py that "-anat_has_skull no"; for this EPI, align_epi_anat.py tended to remove a lot of actual brain if it tried to remove the skull (I think because of the general lack of contrast); therefore, one can either not remove the skull of the EPI, or tell it to use "3dAutomask" to do so, via "-epi_strip 3dAutomask".

Note that when I ran/tested this here, I just used the first 5 time points or so from the EPI time series, for the sake of speed of running.

#!/bin/tcsh

set dset_anat = anatT1.nii.gz
set dset_bold = BOLD_restingstate.nii.gz

set dset_anat_deob = a00_deob.nii
set dset_anat_ss   = a01_ss.nii

set dset_bold_deob = e00_deob.nii

set refvol = template/NMT_SS.nii.gz
set refatl = template/D99_atlas_1.2a_al2NMT.nii.gz
set aw_dir = s01_anwarp

# ==========================================================================

# copy and get rid of obliquity info of anatomical
3dcopy                                \
    ${dset_anat}                      \
    ${dset_anat_deob}

3drefit                               \
    -deoblique                        \
    ${dset_anat_deob}

# ------------------- for center of mass of anatomical
# this should be good enough to center mass around 0 0 0 for template
# alignment
3dSkullStrip                          \
    -prefix    ${dset_anat_ss}        \
    -input     ${dset_anat_deob}      \
    -blur_fwhm 2                      \
    -orig_vol

3dCM                                   \
    -set 0 0 0                         \
    ${dset_anat_ss}

3drefit                                \
    -duporigin ${dset_anat_ss}         \
    ${dset_anat_deob}


# --------------------- for obliquity and center of mass of EPI

3dcalc \
    -a       ${dset_bold}        \
    -expr    'a'                         \
    -prefix  ${dset_bold_deob}

# purge obliquity info, and apply shifts so BOLD dset overlays anat dset well
3drefit                               \
    -deoblique                        \
    ${dset_bold_deob}

3dCM                                  \
    -set 0 0 0                        \
    ${dset_bold_deob}

# ---------------------------------- run main prog for nonlinear warp + skullstripping

@animal_warper                          \
    -input  ${dset_anat_deob}           \
    -base   ${refvol}                   \
    -atlas  ${refatl}                   \
    -outdir ${aw_dir}                   \
    -ok_to_exist


# -----------------------------------------------------------------

# use skullstripped anatomical in orig space (and don't skullstrip it again!);  either use 3dAutomask to skullstrip EPI, or do none at all; results are quite similar:

align_epi_anat.py                         \
    -epi2anat                             \
    -epi ${dset_bold_deob}                \
    -anat ${aw_dir}/a00_deob_ns.nii.gz    \
    -anat_has_skull no \
    -epi_strip 3dAutomask \
    -epi_base 0 -volreg off -tshift off   \
    -suffix TRY5                          \
    -cost lpc+ZZ

align_epi_anat.py                         \
    -epi2anat                             \
    -epi ${dset_bold_deob}                \
    -anat ${aw_dir}/a00_deob_ns.nii.gz    \
    -anat_has_skull no \
    -epi_strip None \
    -epi_base 0 -volreg off -tshift off   \
    -suffix TRY6                          \
    -cost lpc+ZZ

echo "++ Done with aligning anatomical with template"

To provide the same kind of info used in the align_epi_anat.py commands to afni_proc.py, you would use something like the following (exact paths and file names might be different):

-copy_anat      ${aw_dir}/a00_deob_ns.nii.gz        \
-anat_has_skull no                                         \
...
-align_opts_aea                                            \
-cost lpc+ZZ                  \
-epi_strip None            \

... or the same iwth "-epi_strip 3dAutomask", instead.

Happy to answer any followup questions.

--pt