QDECR

Project

About

Who makes QDECR, where it came from, and the conference material from 2019 and 2020.

On this page

QDECR is free software for vertex-wise analysis of FreeSurfer data in R, released under the GPL-3 licence. Its code is on GitHub.

The team

Sander Lamballais

Wrote QDECR’s code, made it fast, and maintains it. Sander is a bioinformatician at the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, building and validating the data pipelines behind long-read rare-disease diagnostics. Before that came a PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2022, with the thesis Shaping the brain: Causes and consequences of the changing brain across the lifespan, and postdoctoral research in neurogenetics. ORCID 0000-0003-3118-6330.

Ryan Muetzel

Conceived QDECR. Ryan is an assistant professor and principal investigator at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry/Psychology of the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, leading the Integrative and Precision Neuroimaging group and co-directing Generation R Neuroimaging. Ryan’s research uses longitudinal population neuroimaging to study typical and atypical brain development, after a PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2016 with the thesis The Connections Within: Pediatric population-based neuroimaging of brain development. ORCID 0000-0003-3215-1287.

The conference work below was written with Henning Tiemeier, Meike W. Vernooij and M. Arfan Ikram.

History

QDECR began at the Erasmus MC as a side project: a way to make FreeSurfer’s group analysis, the QDEC tool and mri_glmfit, easier to use for colleagues who worked in R rather than in Bash. The name is QDEC with an R. Researchers in epidemiology wanted what their other analyses already had: adjustment for many covariates, imputed data for missing values, and samples of thousands. So the analysis was rewritten in R, around R’s own formulas.

  • 2019. Version 0.7.0, the first public release, was presented at OHBM 2019 in Rome with a poster and a software demonstration.
  • 2020. At OHBM 2020, held online, a prototype for vertex-wise mixed models. It was never released; verywise now fits those models.
  • 2021. The paper describing QDECR appeared in Frontiers in Neuroinformatics. How to cite it.
  • 2022. Version 0.9.0, “Lausanne”, added weighted regression. It is the current release.
  • 2026. This site replaced the 2019 one, and work on 0.10.0 began.

Archive

The material from the two OHBM meetings, kept as it was presented. It describes QDECR as it was then: some of what it says has changed since, and the tutorials describe the current release.

OHBM 2019

OHBM 2020

The questions answered at the 2020 meeting are now part of Troubleshooting and FAQ.

Code Ocean