Dear experts,

I am attempting to conduct a meta-analysis using some TBSS studies. Some of the studies use control vs patients but some of the studies use categorises (up to 5 groups) and some report their findings with regards to continuous measures. I'm attempting to fill out the table with the various findings from these papers, however, cannot seem to work out how to report the n numbers (under the columns that would read "n1", "n2" etc. I was looking for some advice on how I could include these various papers in the meta-analysis.

Furthermore, as I am using TBSS papers, I am aware there is advice for a pre-processing step, which reads as below. In the event where I do not have access to this data am I able to carry out the meta-analysis skipping these steps?

# Retrieve the local positive peaks

cluster -i ${1} --mm -n 100000 --olmax=${1}_pos.txt -t 0.1

# Create a negative image to subsequently extract negative peaks

fslmaths ${1} -mul -1 ${1}_neg.nii.gz

# Retrieve the local negative peaks

cluster -i ${1}_neg --mm -n 100000 --olmax=${1}_neg.txt -t 0.1

# Remove the negative image

rm ${1}_neg.nii.gz

Thank you in advance.