Preface

This mini-book attempts to provide a general introduction to the statistics side of structural brain imaging, with a heavy emphasis on practical worked examples. It also introduces a particular toolkit, RMINC, designed to make running these types of statistical analyses easier. It is targeted at the general user, who may or may not have some statistical background, but does have some data they want analysed in a straightforward way. It is not meant to be a complete handbook on statistics, but hopefully will provide enough of a primer to get by, at least for a little while.

This mini-book exists for a number of reasons. I have over the years been asked multiple questions relating to structural brain imaging and statistics, and have had the chance to learn answers to those questions from countless people. This book thus exists as an attempt to put some of those answers down on paper. Secondly, writing this book is part and parcel of the development of RMINC; it is easier to write code useable by others if one documents it first, and then writes code to fit the documentation.

The book will likely be an incomplete work in progress for a long while yet. The L^ATEXsource for this book are packaged along with RMINC itself, and contributors are most welcome!