Hello,
I already asked this question in the Brainmap forum which belongs to the GingerALE software. However, so far I haven't got any reply over there and I'm in need of an answer. I hope you can help me out with this.
I'm quite new to GingerALE and I hope to get some help on an issue I've come across. I have done an ALE analysis under supervision before and now I did the first one on my own.
This is how I proceeded:
First, I gathered all relevant coordinates and transformed the ones reported according to Talairach into MNI space using the non-linear transformation by Lacadie et al. (http://sprout022.sprout.yale.edu/mni2tal/mni2tal.html) - as previously recommended by my supervisor. Then I ran the analysis in MNI space. I am currently checking the results and noticed that the Labels and Brodmann areas which are depicted in the Output Excel sheet are different from the ones I get when I type the coordinated into the Web application by Lacadie. For instance, with the MNI coordinates -50, -38, 24 from the ALE output file, I get Left BA40 (inferior parietal lobule) on the Lacadie Website while the coordinates are depicted as Left BA13 (Insula) in the Excel sheet (which is quite a difference).
Should I trust the labels in the ALE output file or should I double check them using another application for identifying the Brodmann areas? If so, do you have any recommendations?
Hey Julius,
thanks for your reply. To the best of my knowledge, the non-linear transformation by Lacadie et al. is not the same as Brett's. In fact, Lacadie et al. criticize the Brett transformation in their 2008 article. I am aware that the Brett transformation is a bit old-fashioned as I read the GingerALE manual a couple of times. ;)
However, my problem is that when applying different applications for visualizing and identifying cytoarchitectonic areas corresponding to MNI coordinates, I get different results for the same coordinates. Moreover, the areas I get when using the Yale web application are more plausible.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2603575/
If you have any recommendations about which application to use for assigning the functional activations to cytoarchitectonic areas/Brodmann areals, I would be grateful.
I guess I found the reason for the discrepancy between the ALE output file and the Yale web application. In the output file, the nearest gray matter is depicted, while the web application shows me the single point. When testing for both with the Talairach daemon, I get Insula (when searching for the nearest gray matter) and inferior parietal lobule (when searching for the single point) using the same coordinates.
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