Tutorial 6. Multiple windows
Authors: Francois Tadel
Contents
General organization
This tutorial is a parenthesis to explain how the figures are positioned on the screen and how you can organize your workspace more efficiently. One interesting feature of the Brainstorm interface is the ability to open easily multiple views or multiple datasets simultaneously.
The buttons in the menu "Window layout options" can help you organize all the opened figures in an efficient way. There are four options for the automatic placement of the figures on the screen and you have the possibility to save your own specific working environment.
The Brainstorm window is designed to remain on one side of the screen. All the space of the desktop that is not covered by this window will be used for opening other figures. This available space is designated in the menus below as "Full area". Do not try to maximize the Brainstorm window, or the automatic management of the data figures might not work correctly. Keep it on one side of your screen, just large enough so you can read the file names in the database explorer.
Automatic figure positioning
Layout options: Defines how the figures are positioned on the screen
Tiled: All the figures have similar sizes.
Weighted: Some figures containing more information are given more space on the screen. This mode is mostly useful when reviewing continuous recordings.
Full area: Each figure takes all the space available for figures.
None: The new figures are displayed at the default Matlab position, always at the same place, and never re-organized after. Selecting this option can be useful if the auto-arrangement does not work well on your system or if you want to organize your windows by yourself. It is also selected automatically when using "user setups" (see below).
One screen / two screens: If you have multiple monitors, Brainstorm can try to place the database window on one screen and all the other figures on the other screen. If you force Brainstorm to use only one screen, all the figures should stay on the same screen.
Full screen: If selected, the figures are set to their maximum size, covering the Brainstorm window
Show all figures: If you have many figures hidden by some other fullscreen window (Matlab, Firefox to read this tutorial, etc), you don't have click on all of them in the taskbar to get them back. Just make the Brainstorm window visible and click on this button, it would bring all the figures back (not working on some Linux window managers).
User setups: You can save a combination of figures currently opened on your desktop and re-use it later on a different dataset. It can be very useful for reviewing long continuous files.
Close all figures: Last button in the toolbar. Close everything and free the allocated memory.
Example
Double-click on AEF#01 Link to raw file to open the MEG sensors.
Open the EOG signals for the same file: Right-click on the file > EOG > Display time series.
Open a 2D topography for the MEG sensors: Right-click on the file > MEG > 2D sensor cap.
This view represents the values of the all the MEG sensors at the current time point. This type of figures will be described in another tutorial.Cycle through the options: Tiled, Weighted, Full area.
Select the option None, close all the figures (using the [Close all] button), and re-open them.
Notice that now the position of the figures is not managed by Brainstorm anymore.Select again Weighted: the figures are automatically re-arranged again.
Test the option Full screen.
If you have two screens connected, you can try the options One screen / Two screens.
Multiple views of the same data
- Keep all the existing figures: MEG, EOG, 2D topography.
- Open another time series view of the same file, same MEG sensors.
- Note that if you double-click again on the file, it just selects the existing figure.
To force opening another view: Right-click on the file > MEG > Display time series.
Re-arrange the figures in a nicer way.
- Select montage "CTF LT" for one figure, and montage "CTF RF" for the other.
- You can change individually the display properties of each figure.
- When creating a new figure, it re-uses the last display properties that were used.
To change the properties of one figure, you have first to select this figure. Clicking on the title bar of the figure is not enough, you have to click inside the figure (this is due to some limitations of the Matlab figures implementation).
- When the new figure is selected, the controls in the Record tab are updated, and you can change the display properties for this figure.
- There is currently a limitation relative to the continuous file viewer: it is not possible to review two continuous datasets at the same time. This is usually not a problem because we typically review the continuous files one after the other. It will be possible to open multiple data files after we import them in the database, this is what is really useful.
User setups
- Keep the organization of figures previously created (4 figures: MEG LT, MEG RF, EOG, 2D sensor).
In the menu "Window layout options" > User setups > New setup > "Test".
- Close all the figures (using the [Close all] button).
Note that there is a new entry in User setups and that the None layout is now selected. Using custom window configurations disables automatically the automatic arrangement of the windows on the screen.
Double-click on Right / ERF to open it.
Select the menu User setups > TestCTF. It should re-open all the figures that were previously defined for the Left/ERF file, organized in the way you saved them.
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Uniform amplitude scales
- Set the display mode "butterfly" for all the two figures (uncheck the first button in the Record tab).
The button Uniform amplitude scale
in the Record tab can be useful when working with multiple time series figures. If this option is selected, all the time series figures with similar units have the same y-axis scale, so that you can compare visually the amplitudes between two datasets. Double-click on Right / ERF and Left / Std, and click on this button several times.
The scale of the amplitude axis changes in the Left/Std window, and fit alternatively its own maximum or the maximum in the other figure. Uniform amplitude on:
From Epilepsy
User setups
This preparation of the reviewing environment requires a large number of operations, and would become quickly annoying if you have to repeat it every time you open a file. This is a good time to use the menu "User setups" to save this window configuration, to reload it in one click later. In the menu "Window layout", at the top-right of the Brainstorm window, select User setup > New setup. Enter a name of your choice for this particular window arrangement.
This operation will also disable the automatic window arrangement (Window layout > None). To reload it later, open one figure on the dataset you want to review and then select your new entry in the User setup menu.
Multiple montages
It may be interesting for some cases to display different groups of sensors in multiple windows (eg. with an MEG system with 300 sensors), or some complicated epilepsy cases where you would like to review at the same time multiple montages (eg. longitudinal and transversal bipolar montages). Brainstorm offers a flexible way of doing this.
Open your full reviewing environment as described before, where the EEG signals are displayed with the "Average reference" montage.
Open another view on the same data with the "Longitudinal 3" montage ("double-banana" LB-18.3)
Right-click on the "Link to raw file" again > EEG > Display time series
Alternatively, you can right-click on the existing figure > Figure > Clone figure.
- Then set the montage for this new figure to "Longitudinal 3"
- Redimension all the figures to make room for the new window
- Save this as a new "User setup"
- If you don't see the "Longitudinal 3" menu, it is probably because you have using Brainstorm before those predefined montages were made available in the software distribution. To add them manually:
- In the Record tab, select "Edit montages" in the drop-down menu
- Click on the "Load montage" button
- Go to the folder "brainstorm3/toolbox/sensors/private/", and select the first file
- Note that a new entry (probably "Longitudinal 1") is added to the list of available montages
- Repeat the operation with all the files in the folder "brainstorm3/toolbox/sensors/private/"
- Click on "Save" to close the montage editor and now select "Longitudinal 3"
