Reader Comments
Post a new comment on this article
Post Your Discussion Comment
Please follow our guidelines for comments and review our competing interests policy. Comments that do not conform to our guidelines will be promptly removed and the user account disabled. The following must be avoided:
- Remarks that could be interpreted as allegations of misconduct
- Unsupported assertions or statements
- Inflammatory or insulting language
Thank You!
Thank you for taking the time to flag this posting; we review flagged postings on a regular basis.
closeComments madeby the authors
Posted by EdGronenschild on 28 Jun 2012 at 15:47 GMT
As authors of the PloS ONE paper we would like to respond to the numerous e-mails and reactions written on mailings lists and websites. We have never expected that our paper would have such an adverse impact. We have noticed that several so-called “journalists” have misinterpreted and erroneously extrapolated our conclusions. Even though this is not in our hands, we want to express our disappointment of these events and that we feel very uncomfortable with the created harassment.
We want to stress that it has never been our intention to put FreeSurfer in a bad light or to blame its developers, rather we wanted to quantify the effects that the developers frequently warned the users about. The results of our study confirm their recommendations and increase the awareness of such effects to (novice) users.
It is of course unavoidable that modifications to algorithms will produce different results; we, nevertheless, must admit that we were surprised that some effects were rather large.
We are using FreeSurfer frequently for our MRI data and we definitely intend to do so in the future. We are impressed by the efforts of the developer team to improve the algorithms and to extend the capabilities of FreeSurfer. We are most grateful to them because these continuing efforts enabled and will enable us to perform our research in a valid and proper manner.
Unfortunately, the media attention gave the impression that our conclusions would only be directed to FreeSurfer. We have written in our discussion section that some of the conclusions may apply to other packages in the field of neuroimaging as well. We hope that not only the developers but also the users will acknowledge our sincere intention to examine and increase awareness of uncontrolled variation in MRI data analyses in general and not to pinpoint Freesurfer. Therefore, we have informed also the users and developers of FSL about possible similar effects.