Hi all, completely new to brainstorm so bear with me. I need to know if it’s possible to use Brainstorm to extract data in Neuroscan continuous EEG file format from an FIF file. And if it is, is there a straightforward way to do so? Otherwise any help or advice is welcome. Thank you.
Hello;
Continuous Neuroscan files are usually in the .cnt format. You are mentioning .fif, which is for MEG Elekta/Neuromag data.
Both data formats are supported by Brainstorm.
Let me know if you have more questions.
Thanks for the input. My issue is that the FIF file contains simultaneous EEG and MEG recordings which I’m having a hard time separating. I only want the EEG CNT files and I want to be able to extract them to Neuroscan for analysis. Neither I nor anyone at my office knows how to analyze EEG data in Brainstorm yet.
Sorry if my question was confusing. Thanks again.
So I understand your data is actually a .fif file containing both MEG and EEG data and that you want to export the EEG data as .cnt to process it with Neuroscan tools. Is that right?
If not, do you want to use Brainstorm to process the EEG data only? If yes, importing the .fif file in Brainstorm is straightforward, and you can easily decide to process the EEG part only, by declaring the MEG channels as ‘bad’.
If you need training with using Brainstorm, you can refer to the step-by-step tutorial pages at http://neuroimage.usc.edu/brainstorm/Tutorials.
Let me know how we can help any further.
Yes that is correct. I would like to export the EEG data into Neuroscan if possible.
I would say using Brainstorm would be okay but I’m only looking to analyze about 5 subjects and all the other data from studies will be in CNT format so I’m not sure it’s worth it to learn Brainstorm EEG analysis for just those subjects.
However, if it’s my only option I could do the tutorial and try to figure it out.
OK. there is no option in Brainstorm to export data in a different file format.
However, once imported into Brainstorm, all data is easily accessible as Matlab files (essentially channel.mat and data.mat files). You can then manipulate what you need to write it back to .cnt, but you’ll need to write your own scripts for that.
That said, you may want to have a look at the tutorials. Maybe they will convince you to give a try to Brainstorm and you’ll realize it’s easy and quick to learn 
Gotcha. Well, thank you so much for your help! I’ll look into that!
Reviewing and processing EEG data in Brainstorm is not very complicated. If you import your .fif files in Brainstorm, you would have access separately to the EEG and MEG sensors.
You can have a look to the tutorials in the section “Processing continuous recordings”, that teach you how to review, epoch and analyze continuous Neuromag .fif files:
http://neuroimage.usc.edu/brainstorm/Tutorials/TutRawViewer
http://neuroimage.usc.edu/brainstorm/Tutorials/TutMindNeuromag
I’ve decided that that is what I’ll have to do. Unfortunately it looks like the tutorial for processing continuous files stops after the first chapter on reviewing the recordings. It might be a problem on my end, I’m not sure. But in any case, I’ll have to do some searching.
Thank you for your help!
I’m sorry, I’ve just started working on this tutorial…
I’m rewriting it based on a new dataset, and I’m going to extend it to illustrate some new features added in 2012.
It will remain readable, but the text, images and data will not match.
Or if you prefer, you can wait for a few days, it should be finished next week.
Oh no worries! I can wait a week or so. Thank you! 
FYI: The tutorials for the continuous files are 90% finished, you can start reading them.
See the three new pages in the “Processing continuous recordings” advanced tutorials.
http://neuroimage.usc.edu/brainstorm/Tutorials
Francois
Fantastic! Thanks a ton!