Dear Shady,

thank you for you reply. I suppose I was not clear enough in my original post. I was wondering if it is possible to use partial correlation in seed-to-voxel analysis to further investigate the findings obtained in this analysis. In my case that would mean to include the thalamus, which was not present as a seed but was obtained as a result of seed-voxel analysis. The idea was to further investigate, which variance in the data is attributable to the thalamic time course. In brief:

1. Seed-to-voxel analysis using ICA networks as seed
2. Result: Several areas show increased connectivity with this seed, the thalamus is among those regions
3. Use partial correlation to regress out the signal of the thalamus (either the whole thalamus or a cluster)

Does that makes sense? Any help would be highly appreciated