Page overlap while reviewing raw file -- a way to set to 0%?

Thanks for your inquiry about requests re: review and events, because I have some! :grinning:

Yes, so far, we have been testing out the sleep scoring basically the way you describe:
Step 1: Starting at the beginning of a file, with the cursor at the beginning of a page, press a key to assign a sleep stage
Step 2: Page forward to the next page
Step 3: Repeat until the end of the recording

This works pretty well, but:

  1. Yes, a special keyboard shortcut to advance the page without any overlap would be certainly a useful addition.

  2. Yes, an option to create events that have a user-defined length or cover a full page would also be useful. Currently, it would be necessary to always ensure that one's cursor remains exactly at the first sample on a 30sec screen, so that the single-point event consistently marks the onset of a 30-sec epoch (this allows later segmentation into different stages in preparation for subsequent analysis, and also works well for custom analysis of time spent in each sleep-stage, etc.). But it is really easy to accidentally move one's cursor and throw everything off, so it would be more ideal to be able to have the event just automatically cover the entire current page, regardless of cursor position. This would also help with the problem that, if the event is marked only at the onset of the page, you can barely see the visual marker label that comes up on the screen (because it appears right on the leading edge of the window).

  3. But what would REALLY make this kind of visual scoring easier would be if there were an option such that, once an event is assigned to a page, the view AUTOMATICALLY flips to the next page. This is how sleep-scoring-specific applications work, allowing one to very quickly move through a record using only one keystroke per page. I think many users might also be interested in this workflow for visually marking artifact (yes artifact / no artifact) on a fast page-by-page basis in continuous data.

  4. Another change that would make this type of scoring easier would be if the small event-marker icons inside the scroll bar at the bottom of the reviewing screen were larger. These marks are essential for seeing what the scores of the prior and upcoming epochs are, and for visually checking that every epoch has correctly received a score, but they are currently so tiny the are hard to see. If these were larger, and if they filled the time of the whole epoch instead of just a single point, it would be more useful. The existing color-coding of these marks and different height that the marks appear at is excellent though.

I realize that the last two ideas are very ultra-specific to the type of visual classification that we do in sleep research, and so might not be practicable to implement. But on the other hand, I think there are quite a few sleep researchers out there who do quantitative EEG analyses of various kinds and would be more attracted to Brainstorm if it had these features.

Thanks for your work on Brainstorm!

Erin Wamsley
Furman University