1st/2nd Level Modeling post fMRIPrep

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Hello all,

I have successfully run fMRIPrep (1.3.2) on some data and need to begin modeling. I have never modeled fMRI data so I am a little lost on what the best way to proceed is. Is it recomended to use fitlins or to follow the tutorial Chris made (https://github.com/poldrack/fmri-analysis-vm/blob/master/analysis/postFMRIPREPmodelling/First%20and%20Second%20Level%20Modeling%20(SPM).ipynb)? I started following this tutorial with my data, but it was made 2 years ago so it seems some of the exact lines/variables don’t match. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I have also seen some tutorials on custom pipelines using Nipype, but they all use custom preprocessing not fMRIPrep outputs.

Thanks,
Alen

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It depends what your goal is right now. There are a number of things that most people would want for results they’re interested in publishing that are not yet implemented. For example, thresholding and cluster correction are completely missing, first-level variance estimates are not yet accounted for in second level modeling, and subject-level variables cannot currently be used as confounds.

If you’re looking to explore your data, want to try to write a BIDS model, and potentially want to engage with me to develop the features you need, then FitLins can be useful to you, and you’re likely to learn a fair bit.

But if you want to do standard modeling, it’s probably best to use Nipype, or, if you can find a usable tutorial, one of the standard packages.

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I think for now our lab just needs to start with the basic/standard modeling. I will try something in Nipype for now based on the tutorials I’ve seen. Thank you.

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As another potential reference, we’ve also put together an example Nipype workflow for post-fMRIPrep first- and second-level models in FSL here. Let us know if there’s anything else that we can help clarify!

3 Likes
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Hello again,

I have a working script based off of this notebook: https://github.com/poldrack/fmri-analysis-vm/blob/master/analysis/postFMRIPREPmodelling/First%20and%20Second%20Level%20Modeling%20(FSL).ipynb

However, I just had a question about applying it to my data. I have a task that has two runs. At what point do I combine the two runs in FSL? How does that work? Everything from the notebook above grabs 1 run (I’m assuming the task was one run), and there is nothing about dealing with multiple runs.

Thanks.