BCI2000

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

BCI2000 provides two interfaces to 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.

On this page you can find background information from the BCI2000 perspective.

The MatlabFilter and the FieldTripBuffer interface to MATLAB are supported for any acquisition system that is supported by BCI2000 in general.