Artifact Detection (ICA, SSP) - No Outputs?

Bugs
1

Hello Brainstorm Developers and Community,

I’m currently working with MEG data collected with simultaneous EEG on adults during a saccade task. I’ve done high pass, low pass, and notch filtering on the data. Now I’m trying to do artifact detection for blinks and heartbeat. First I tried using the ICA decomposition because I was familiar with the technique. Brainstorm goes through the runica (via EEGLAB) perfectly but seems to have no output (e.g., graphical display of components, new dataset, etc.). When I tried to find a tutorial for ICA in Brainstorm the page was blank, so I assumed the technique just wasn’t completely developed in the current version of Brainstorm. So I tried artifact detection with SSP, which does have a tutorial. I followed the SSP tutorial (first getting event marks for blinks, then running SSP with recommended blink settings via the pipeline editor). Again, the decomposition process seemed to work fine (i.e., no errors popped up and the loading bar reached 100%), but there was no output. On the tutorial it showed a screenshot of an output (a window with the header “Signal-space projections,” attached with this thread), but nothing like that happened when I ran it.

Should something be happening that isn’t happening? Can anyone provide advice or help as to how to solve this issue?

Thank you,
Lindsey Tate

2

Hi Lindsey,

The ICA support is fully working but lacks of some tests for controlling the quality of the data in input and output, so it doesn’t work well it may crash in a weird way, with cryptic error messages. Or maybe not return anything at all.
There is no documentation yet either. Hopefully we’ll have time to work on this during the second half of this year.

The figure you don’t see can be opened manually from the menu “Artifacts > Select active projectors” in the Record tab.
Sometimes it hides behind on other windows on some operating systems.

I would recommend you start by following in the correct order all the introduction tutorials in the “Get started” section, using the dataset provided for these tutorials.
It would help you get more familiar with the interface, and make sure everything works on your computer.
http://neuroimage.usc.edu/brainstorm/Tutorials

Once you have made sure that you can reproduce the tutorial datasets, please get back to me describing more your data, and include a screen capture of what your database looks like.

If you get the same problem while replicating exactly step by step the contents of tutorials #1 to #13, please copy-paste here the output of the “ver” command in Matlab.

Cheers,
Francois