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Contents
- Introduction
- Users Guide
The EDDY QC tools
The EDDY QC framework consists of two different tools that automatically perform QC both at the single subject and study-wise level.
QUAD (QUality Assessment for DMRI) generates single subject reports and stores the quality assessment indices for each subject.
SQUAD (Study-wise QUality Assessment for DMRI) reads all the single subject outputs from QUAD, generates study-wise reports and, optionally, enters these into a database. Moreover, SQUAD can optionally update single subject reports, indicating how the subject’s dataset compares to other data, using either a study-specific group database or a pre-generated database obtained from a different dataset. Lastly, SQUAD also allows to report QC indices based on user-provided variables.
The tools can be called from the command line using eddy_quad and eddy_squad.
Running QUAD
QUAD expects an EDDY output basename to identify the relevant output files that have been generated according to some user-specified options. If a feature, e.g., outliers detection and replacement, was not used, the outliers-related quality metrics will not be included in the final report nor added to the single-subject database. The most basic way to run eddy_quad after having pre-processed the dMRI dataset consists in running the following example command:
eddy_quad <eddy_output_basename> -idx <eddy_index_file> -par <eddy_acqparams_file> -m <nodif_mask> -b <bvals>
This will result in the creation of a new folder, called <eddy_output_basename>.qc. This will contain the single subject QC report and database, together with the slices included in the report stored as single image files.
List of input parameters
- Compulsory arguments:
<eddy_output_basename>
Basename for EDDY output-files, i.e., corrected images and QC files.-idx <eddy_index_file>, --eddyIdx=<eddy_index_file>
Text file containing indices linking each acquired volume to the acquisition parameters-par <eddy_acqparams_file>, --eddyParams=<eddy_acqparams_file>
Text file containing acquisition parameters-m <nodif_mask>, --mask=<nodif_mask>
Binary mask file for the whole brain or a specific region. All voxel-wise QC metrics consider entries only from the marked voxels.-b <bvals>, --bvals=<bvals>
b-values text file- Optional arguments: