I have been recording HRV & EEG data from a client as part of a preliminary single subject study. I realise that EDF files are native to Brainstorm, but will it be relatively painless to import and display the raw EEG data from the EPOC (not being a pro system)? I am new to EEG and am looking for open source software to do some visualisation/analysis as part of a self-imposed steep learning curve.
Is Brainstorm going to be a solution for me with the EPOC data I have?
Any general words of wisdom welcome.
Kind Regards,
Matthew Dahlitz
Hi Matthew,
I don’t think there is a direct support for Emotiv EPOC files yet. I don’t know in what format those recordings are saved…
If you have Matlab code to read those files, I could add this relatively rapidly.
If not, the conversion to EDF or ASCII formats would work.
http://neuroimage.usc.edu/brainstorm/Tutorials/Epilepsy
http://neuroimage.usc.edu/forums/showthread.php?1448-Process-EEG-data-(new-brainstormer!)
Cheers,
Francois
Hi Matthew,
The EDF format is indeed supported by Brainstorm. I don’t have the Emotiv Epoc, but assuming that they’ve implemented the format faithfully I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.
Note that you will also need to provide Brainstorm with a channel file containing the position of the EEG electrodes on the head. Ideally you would have digitised the positions using a Polhemus digitiser or similar device, but—so long as you don’t expect to do source localisation (which I wouldn’t recommend anyways given the poor and uneven electrode coverage of the unmodified Epoc)—you may be able to get away with just assuming standard 10-20 locations. I actually created such a template channel file for the Epoc while trying some simulations of low-cost headsets a while back: https://cl.ly/312d1g363V0Y
If you plan on doing ERPs, be aware that TestBench and the Epoc really don’t offer very accurate timing (see http://sccn.ucsd.edu/pipermail/eeglablist/2012/005070.html). Many people use OpenViBE (http://openvibe.inria.fr) instead of TestBench when using the Epoc for ERPs. This is also a good reference: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23638374.
As for whether Brainstorm is a good match for your purposes, it really depend on the types of analyses you would like to do. I highly recommend you go through the tutorials; it will give you a good feel for the feature scope and types of analyses you can do. Even if the tutorials are more targeted towards MEG, many of the concepts are equally applicable to EEG.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Thanks so much Francois and Jeremy for your response. Thanks also Jeremy for the channel template file - that’s fantastic. I will dive into the tutorials and see how I go.
The pressure is off concerning the current preliminary study as our initial experiments with dysregulated kids in the field were very disappointing and have dropped the idea of EEG as a bio measure (only going to use HRV) - very difficult to get clean readings with these kids in the field and I imagine what we can capture would be a big challenge to clean up even by the most expert EEG analyst.
Nevertheless, I’m keen to learn for future studies when we may be able to have more regulated subjects in more controlled environments!
Kind Regards,
Matt