Figure 4.

Analysis cascade for rodent analysis at the group level. After animal preparation and scanning, quality control could be performed first at the scan console and second during the pre-processing at the analysis console with the option of re-scanning of low-quality data sets. A stereotaxic normalization to atlas coordinates can be refined by the creation of study-specific templates and a subsequent template normalization. Analysis at the group level can be performed by hypothesis-guided ROI analysis or tractwise analysis or by unbiased whole brain-based analysis, each followed by a statistical analysis extracting and representing significant results using a pre-defined significance level.