Firstly, a white matter skeleton template is created based on the average FA volumes of the sample. Next, for each subject, the TBSS algorithm searches each voxel on the individual skeleton for the one with the highest FA nearby the skeleton template. This maximum voxel is then projected onto the common skeleton template, thus creating one skeleton for each subject, which is assumed to contain the centers of the white matter tracts that are common to all subjects. Voxel-wise statistics are then performed on these click here individual skeletons.

TBSS was carried out using standard procedures freely available from FSL [31]. The alignment of the skeleton template with each subject’s FA volume was visually checked, and the

template was thresholded at FA>0.2. (The TBSS skeleton template is shown in Supplementary Figure 1.) FA values within the skeletons were then compared between C-carriers and individuals homozygous for the A-allele in the control and high-risk groups separately using voxel-wise nonparametric t tests calculated by “randomise” in FSL. Statistics were corrected for multiple comparisons according to family-wise error (P<.05) using threshold-free cluster enhancement (TFCE) [32]. Additionally, to look for any clusters on trend level, the raw T-statistic images were thresholded at T> 3.41, equivalent to P<.001 (df=82). For the control group, an additional analysis was performed with age included as a covariate. Because two previous studies [20] and [22] selleck products showed that ZNF804A was related to task-independent functional connectivity between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortices, an SVC was applied to include only voxels within the skeleton and the body and genu of corpus callosum ( Supplementary Figure 2). In the presence of a priori hypotheses, the use of an SVC increases statistical power Non-specific serine/threonine protein kinase by restricting the analysis to a specific region, thereby decreasing the penalty of multiple

comparison correction over many voxels. The SVC was created using the John Hopkins University white matter labels atlas in MNI space [33], thresholded to include only the genu and body of corpus callosum, smoothed (FWHM 1.1 mm), binarized and multiplied with the skeleton mask to include only voxels that were in both the skeleton and the corpus callosum SVC. Voxel-wise analysis was rerun with this SVC applied as a mask. In addition, using the SVC as an ROI, the average FA was extracted from this region and compared between genotype groups using independent-sample t tests. (Of note, by merging the body and genu of corpus callosum, we are compromising the power to detect any very focal signals, which are more likely to be detected in the voxel-wise analysis with SVC, while gaining power to detect more diffuse signals within the corpus callosum.