Segmentation by DARTEL Templates

 Hello DPARSFA researchers,

I'm working with two different subject populations - one which has 31 rfMRI slices and 240 time points and one which has 36 slices and 300 time points. There are a couple of patients who have different numbers of slices as well (e.g., 32 and 33). So far, I've run:

• Dicom to nifti on both the T1 and rfMRI data using dcm2nii (i.e., not in DPARSFA), because I needed to L-R flip some of the patients to have lesions line up on the "same" side)
• I've set my time points to "0" so that I can run processing over subjects with different numbers of time points and all subjects have a TR = 2 sec
• I've changed the setting to "Calculate in MNI space (Warp by DARTEL)"
• Slice timing correction on each group of patients whose rfMRI data has the same number of slices (i.e., all of the 31 slice patients together with slice number = 31, slice order = [1 3 5...31 2 4 6...30], and reference slice = 31; and the appropriate corresponding settings for the other slice number groups)
• Realignment, reorient fun, automask, reorient T1, BET, and T1 Coreg to Fun over all of the patient groups without separating them into their different slice number groups

I found that when I run "New Segment + DARTEL", the processing step terminates with an error if I don't split up the subjects based upon their slice numbers. If I run all of my 31 slice subjects through this step at the same time as all of my 36 slice subjects, the function terminates early with a "Parallel workers" error. However, I have been able to successfully complete this step if I split my subjects up into their slice number groups. I know that the "Templates" are saved under the first subject in each group that undergoes this processing step and I've looked at the templates across my groups after segmentation is completed. The templates for different groups look different from one another and I'm worried that I'm not applying the same processing to each of my subjects; that is, I'm worried that I'm not mapping all of the subjects to thes same standard space. Are the templates used during the segmentation + DARTEL step to map each subject to MNI space? Are the templates used at all after this step? Is there a way to force DPARSFA to run the New Segment + DARTEL step over all subjects despite different slice numbers?

Thanks,

Riley