EEGLAB is a

MATLAB MATLAB (an abbreviation of "MATrix LABoratory") is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementa ...

toolbox distributed under the free

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Be ...

license for processing data from

electroencephalography Electroencephalography (EEG) is a method to record an electrogram of the spontaneous electrical activity of the brain. The biosignals detected by EEG have been shown to represent the postsynaptic potentials of pyramidal neurons in the neocor ...

(EEG),

magnetoencephalography Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a functional neuroimaging technique for mapping brain activity by recording magnetic fields produced by electrical currents occurring naturally in the brain, using very sensitive magnetometers. Arrays of SQUIDs (s ...

(MEG), and other electrophysiological signals. Along with all the basic processing tools, EEGLAB implements

independent component analysis In signal processing, independent component analysis (ICA) is a computational method for separating a multivariate signal into additive subcomponents. This is done by assuming that at most one subcomponent is Gaussian and that the subcomponents a ...

(ICA), time/frequency analysis, artifact rejection, and several modes of data visualization. EEGLAB allows users to import their electrophysiological data in about 20 binary file formats, preprocess the data, visualize activity in single trials, and perform ICA. Artifactual ICA components may be subtracted from the data. Alternatively, ICA components representing brain activity may be further processed and analyzed. EEGLAB also allows users to group data from several subjects, and to cluster their independent components.

History

In 1997, a set of data processing functions was first released on the Internet by Scott Makeig in the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory directed by

Terry Sejnowski Terrence Joseph Sejnowski (born 13 August 1947) is the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and is the director of the Crick-Jacobs center for theoretical ...

at the

Salk Institute The Salk Institute for Biological Studies is a scientific research institute located in the La Jolla community of San Diego, California, U.S. The independent, non-profit institute was founded in 1960 by Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vacci ...

, under the name “the ICA/EEG toolbox”. In 2000, Arnaud Delorme designed a

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows User (computing), users to Human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through graphical icon (comp ...

on top of these functions along with some of his own artifact removal functions, and released the first version of the “EEGLAB software for artifact removal”. In 2003, Delorme and Makeig joined efforts to release the first stable and fully documented version of EEGLAB. In 2004, EEGLAB was awarded funding by the

NIH The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late 1 ...

for continued development of research software.

Statistics

EEGLAB was downloaded about 25,000 times from 73 countries worldwide in its first three years (2003–2006) and in 2011 was reported to be the most widely used signal processing environment for processing of EEG data by cognitive neuroscientists
survey results
. Its reference paper (Delorme & Makeig, 2004) has received ove
12,400 citations
(02/2013). EEGLAB comprises over 380 stand-alone MATLAB functions and over 50,000 lines of code and hosts over 20 user-contributed plug-ins. Significant plug-in toolboxes continue to be written and published by researchers at the Swartz Center, UCSD, and by many other groups. Major plug-ins include: * DIPFIT, for source localization of ICA component sources of EEG data;
ERPLAB
for deriving measures from average event-related potentials;
FASTER
a fully automated, unsupervised method for processing high density EEG data;
NBT
a toolbox for the computation and integration of neurophysiological biomarkers;
NFT
for building electrical forward head models from MR images and/or electrode positions;
SIFT
a source information flow toolbox;
BCILAB
an extensive environment for building and testing

brain–computer interface A brain–computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a brain–machine interface (BMI) or smartbrain, is a direct communication pathway between the brain's electrical activity and an external device, most commonly a computer or robotic limb. B ...

models; Hundreds of researchers have contributed directly or indirectly to the software by programming functions or reporting bugs. The current eeglablist email discussion list has over 5,000 members worldwide (2013).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Eeglab Free mathematics software Magnetoencephalography Electroencephalography

History

Statistics

See also

References