Streaming realtime data from and to BCI2000 - FieldTrip toolbox https://www.fieldtriptoolbox.

org/development/realtime/bci2000/

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Streaming realtime data from and to • Interface with MATLAB and

FieldTrip

BCI2000 • FieldTrip buffer source module

BCI2000 is a general-purpose system for brain-computer interface (BCI) research. It can

also be used for data acquisition, stimulus presentation, and brain monitoring
applications.

It has support in the core version for the following hardware:

• g.USBamp
• g.MOBIlab
• g.MOBIlab+ Bluetooth (g.tec)

Furthermore, users have contributed support for the following hardware:

• A/D Converter Boards

• Data Translations, Inc.
• National Instruments, Inc.
• Measurement Computing, Inc.
• Modular-EEG Systems
• Amplifiers/Digitizers
• Tucker-Davis Pentusa
• Biosemi
• BioRadio 150 (Cleveland Medical Devices, Inc.)
• Refa System (TMSi, Inc.)
• EEG Systems
• Neuroscan, Inc.
• Brain Vision, V-Amp (Brain Products)
• Micromed EEG Systems
• Electrical Geodesics Amp Server

Interface with MATLAB and FieldTrip

BCI2000 provides two interfaces for processing the data in MATLAB

• MatlabFilter
• FieldTripBuffer

The difference between the two interfaces to MATLAB is that the MatlabFilter causes
some pre-specified MATLAB code to be executed in the BCI2000 pipeline, i.e. BCI2000
stays in control over the timing and the MATLAB session only sees a small fragment of
the data. That also forces you to write your MATLAB code to use recursive/incremental
updating schemes.

The FieldTripBuffer interface to MATLAB allows you to control the timing from within
MATLAB and read arbitrary sections of data from the ongoing data stream as if it were a
continuously growing file, giving more flexibility in the MATLAB code that you can
employ. The advantage of the FieldTripBuffer interface is that you have all control in
MATLAB that you are used to. You can write your MATLAB code for offline-analysis (i.e.
reading data from a file) and apply exactly the same code to online analysis (i.e. reading
from BCI2000). Of course for the online analysis to make some sense, your analysis script
has to be meaningful and has to work with relatively small data fragments (e.g., one
second or less), otherwise the MATLAB code would not really run in real-time. Another
interesting feature is that in MATLAB you can use the profiler (type “help profile”) to
determine which parts of your code take a long time to execute and speed those parts
up.

On this page you can find example code that demonstrates how to interface FieldTrip and
BCI2000.
Edit this page on GitHub.
On this page you can find background information from the BCI2000 perspective.
This page last modified: 2023-04-12 10:39 +0200
Copyright (C) 1999-2023; License; Privacy
The MatlabFilter and the FieldTripBuffer interface to MATLAB are supported for any

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Streaming realtime data from and to BCI2000 - FieldTrip toolbox https://www.fieldtriptoolbox.org/development/realtime/bci2000/

acquisition system that is supported by BCI2000 in general. For an overview of such

systems,
• Interface with MATLABplease see these
and FieldTrip pages on devices supported in core BCI2000 and further tools
• FieldTrip buffer sourceacquisition
for data module contributed to BCI2000.

FieldTrip buffer source module

We have developed FieldTripBufferSource, a BCI2000 signal source module that reads
data and events from a FieldTrip buffer, and thus behaves like an acquisition system from
BCI2000’s point of view. The user needs to configure the hostname and port where the
buffer resides, the blocksize, the number of channels, and optionally a list of states that
will be modified according to the value of equally named events from the FieldTrip buffer.

Note: Similarly to the aforementioned FieldTripBuffer filter, the FieldTripBufferSource

module does not define any state variables on its own. This means that it’s not possible
to translate general buffer events to BCI2000 states, but only events whose type string
matches the name of an existing state variable in BCI2000 (e.g., ‘Recording’). As a
possible future extension, it would be nice to flexibly adapt the source module to the
type of events that are being written to the buffer for a particular application.

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