Multiscale Electrophysiology Format (MEF) was developed to handle the large amounts of data produced by large-scale

electrophysiology Electrophysiology (from Ancient Greek, Greek , ''ēlektron'', "amber" ee the Electron#Etymology, etymology of "electron" , ''physis'', "nature, origin"; and , ''-logy, -logia'') is the branch of physiology that studies the electrical propertie ...

in human and animal subjects. MEF can store any time series data up to 24

bit The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communications. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represente ...

s in length, and employs lossless range encoded difference compression. Subject identifying information in the file header can be

encrypted In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding information. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Ideally, only authorized parties can deci ...

using 128-bit AES encryption in order to comply with

HIPAA The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA or the Kennedy– Kassebaum Act) is a United States Act of Congress enacted by the 104th United States Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on August 21, 1 ...

requirements for

patient privacy Medical privacy or health privacy is the practice of maintaining the security and confidentiality of patient records. It involves both the conversational discretion of health care providers and the security of medical records. The terms can also ...

when transmitting data across an open network. Compressed data is stored in independent blocks to allow direct access to the data, facilitate parallel processing and limit the effects of potential damage to files. Data fidelity is ensured by a 32-bit cyclic redundancy check in each compressed data block using the Koopman polynomial (0xEB31D82E), which has a

Hamming distance In information theory, the Hamming distance between two strings of equal length is the number of positions at which the corresponding symbols are different. In other words, it measures the minimum number of ''substitutions'' required to chan ...

of from 4 to 114 kbits. A formal specification and source code are available online. MEF_import is an EEGLAB plugin to import MEF data into EEGLAB.

References

Sources

* Martin, GNN. Range encoding: an algorithm for removing redundancy from a digitised message. Video & Data Recoding Conference, Southampton, 1979. * Koopman, P. 32-Bit Cyclic Redundancy Codes for Internet Applications. The International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (June 2002). 459. * {{cite journal , last1 = Brinkmann , first1 = BH , display-authors = etal , year = 2009 , title = Large-scale electrophysiology: acquisition, compression, encryption, and storage of big data , journal = Journal of Neuroscience Methods , volume = 180 , issue = 1, pages = 185–192 , pmc=2720128 , pmid=19427545 , doi=10.1016/j.jneumeth.2009.03.022 * Electrophysiology Neurophysiology Neurotechnology Bioinformatics Health standards Computer file formats

See also

References

Sources