Statistical Analysis of Longitudinal Neuroimage Data with Linear Mixed Effects Models.
J.L.Bernal-Rusiel, D.N.Greve, M.Reuter et al.
NeuroImage 66:249-260, 2012.
[BibTex]
[DOI-Link] [PubMed]
details
Longitudinal neuroimaging (LNI) studies are rapidly becoming more prevalent and growing in size. However, widely used methods for the statistical analysis are often sub-optimal. Linear Mixed Effects (LME) modeling, a mature approach well known in the statistics community, offers a powerful and versatile framework for analyzing real-life LNI data. This article presents the theory behind LME models, contrasts it with other popular approaches (repeated measures ANOVA or annualized atrophy rates) in the context of LNI, provides empirical evaluation of the performance, and is accompanied with an array of computational tools that will be made freely available through FreeSurfer. hide |