I ran 3 identical first level FSL analyses of a localiser scan in order to
compare the different bet settings (applied to all structural and functional
images). I can confirm that BET with the recursive flag (-R) produces the
best outcomes with higher Z values when transformed to standard space. The
-B option looks good when examining the resulting BET images, and deals
nicely with residual neck artefacts, but actually produces worse results at
the level of the statistics.
Below are images showing zstats from each first level analysis (face-place
localiser), converted to standard space and displayed on the MNI brain.
PPA (blue), FFA (orange), standard space - BET with no options
http://i.imgur.com/q3FdX.png
PPA (blue), FFA (orange), standard space - BET with -B option
http://i.imgur.com/QC9al.png
PPA (blue), FFA (orange), standard space - BET with recursive option (-R)
http://i.imgur.com/Nqob1.png
Activation is more extensive and more significant with the -R option.
Images of the structural scans after each bet extraction can be seen in the
album below
http://laserdragon.imgur.com/brainimaging
It seems that the standard pipeline involves using the -R option anyway, but
I thought people might be interested to see the difference it makes, and
that the -B option turns out to be pretty bad.
Chris