Here you can find guidelines about the SPM on-line service for the SPM analysis of PET and SPECT images of patients with neurological disorders. You can print this document before to start to use the SPM service.

1. Go to “SPM access” section. Here you must insert your User-name and Password. User name and Password are provided to you personally at the end of one of our SPM specific training course (see “Authorization” section). The access to SPM service requires in fact a further authorization with respect to the navigation on the portal. This is due to the difficulty and the complexity of the use of SPM, that needs the attendance at specific training course. A user not having attended such a course may require his/her registration data at the address info@neuroinf.it by specifying the motivations for the use of the service and by providing a short description of the planned activity and of his/her skills about SPM. Otherwise, you can proceed as a DEMO user (login: demo, password: testdemo), running SPM service with DEMO patient files (one for SPECT and one for PET) available on the web and provided to you. Once inserting login and password, press “>log in”.
2. Fill the table with your data (Surname, Name, phone, mobile, email), mandatory for contact purposes. If you are a DEMO user, press directly “>submit”.
3. Insert you patient study. Fill the table relative to Patient data (Age, sex, type of images) and insert your patient images from your PC. Press “>submit”. A screen is shown with a message informing on your uploaded studies. Select “Insert new patient” if you want to upload a new patient study, “Select study” if you want to process again a study you have already uploaded, “Select DEMO studies”, if you are a DEMO user. Press “OK”.
4. Select the type of analysis you want to perform:
   • normalization (first step of image pre-processing: include normalization, smoothing, and statistical analysis)
   • smoothing (second step of image pre-processing: include smoothing and statistical analysis). It must be performed on normalized images only
   • statistical analysis (statistical analysis only). It must be performed on pre-processed images.
   Press “SUBMIT”.
5. Define the Defaults for Parameter Estimation and for Writing Normalized. Parameters are proposed for SPECT studies. In case of PET studies you must change:
   • # of nonlinear basis functions (from 7x8x7 to none)
   • Voxel sizes (from 2 2 4 to 2 2 2)
   Press “SUBMIT”.
6. Define the Parameters for Normalization”. Parameters are proposed for SPECT studies. In case of PET studies you must change:
   • Template image (from ecd_template16b.img to PET.img)
   Press “SUBMIT”.
7. Define the Parameters for “Smoothing”. Parameters are proposed for SPECT studies. In case of PET studies you must change:
   • Filter smoothing in mmm (from 20 20 12 to 8 8 8)
   Press “SUBMIT”.
8. The page for the Query to the Metadata Catalog (Normal Subjects Catalog) is shown. You cal select all normal subjects (“All”) or subgroups of normal subjects (“Advanced search”, only males M, only females F, age intervals). Press “SUBMIT”.
9. A page with a list of normal subjects is shown. Select normal subjects (all normal subjects are selected by default). Press “SUBMIT”.
10. Define parameters for statistical analysis. Parameters are proposed for SPECT studies. In case of PET studies you must change:
    • PropSca global mean (from 50 to 6.5)
    • analysis thresh (from 0.6 to 0.8)
    Press “SUBMIT”. The statistical analysis can take few minutes.
11. Press on the link “RESULTS”. A zipped folder containing all the files necessary for the result visualization will be downloaded. The threshold steps should be completed on user's pc, with SPM99 tool installed. Also the hypocaptation maps will be visualized by the user. After downloading the result folder, it's very important to remember to press the “EXIT” button.