EEGLAB: Software for Analysis of Human Brain Dynamics

University Of California, San Diego, La Jolla CA

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Under the ARRA Competitive Revision program (NOT-OD-10-032), "NIH Announces the Availability of Recovery Act Funds for Competitive Revision Applications (R01, R03, R15, R21, R21/R33, and R37) through the NIH Basic Behavioral and Social Science Opportunity Network (OppNet)," we propose a major enhancement to our ongoing NINDS-funded research and development project, "EEGLAB: Software for Analysis of Human Brain Dynamics" (2R01-NS047293-05) by further developing, continuing to maintain, and freely distributing for non-profit research use a sophisticated Experimental Real-time, Interactive Control and Analysis (ERICA) software environment for recording, synchronizing, and performing real-time computation on concurrent EEG, behavioral, sensory, and/or other psychophysiological data (DataRiver), and for running complex, interactive, multi-modal, single- or multi-subject experiments (Producer, MatRiver, Enactor). The ERICA environment will support the development of high-density EEG as a brain imaging modality for studying mobile subjects who act, react, and/or interact in natural ways within normal 3-D environments. To this end, the ERICA environment will enable simultaneous recording of portable high-density EEG, behavioral and whole-body motion capture, as well as audiovisual scene capture (wearable eye tracking, audiovisual scene recording, etc.), combined to form a new experimental modality for which we propose the term mobile brain/body imaging (MoBI). The ERICA software environment will be capable of coordinated interactive control of multidimensional audio, visual, and haptic stimulus delivery systems incorporating a VRML model of the actual and/or virtual subject environment. The ERICA software environment, already partially developed by us under other private and public funding, will be linked directly to our established EEGLAB software environment and our newly funded archival human electrophysiological data and tools resource (HeadIT) using the Biomedical Information Resource Network (BIRN) software framework (1RO1-MH084819-01). When linked to the developed EEGLAB and HeadIT environments and to EEGLAB plug-in packages now published by many research groups, the suite of software environments EEGLAB, HeadIT, and ERICA will together constitute a complete, freely available, and readily extensible software framework for developing and applying human electrophysiology as a functional brain imaging modality, thereby expanding the effects of EEGLAB to speed progress in electrophysiological research by enabling and encouraging new forms of EEG experimental design, data collection, and data analysis and meta-analysis. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: EEGLAB Compet. Supp. NARRATIVE (Relevance) Functional brain imaging using scalp-recorded electroencephalography (EEG) can be low cost, non-invasive, and highly mobile, with fine time resolution. The principal obstacle to its more widespread medical use has been the lack of adequate software to extract and visualize the information it contains. The proposed ERICA software suite combined with our EEGLAB analysis platform will form a powerful and freely available software environment for a wide range of basic and clinical EEG research, accelerating the emergent use of EEG for functional brain imaging.