[FieldTrip] General questions

[Vahe Poghosyan]

Dear fieldtrip users and developer,

I am new to fieldtrip. I think it's an excellent toolbox (thanks to the
developers), but have few general questions:

1. I understand that fieldtrip is a data analysis toolbox, however the
results of the analysis need to be visualized. I find the fieldtrip
visualization functions, especially of the source analysis results (e.g.
ft_sourceplot, ft_sourceinterpolate, ft_sourcemovie) inadequate.
My question is how do you usually visualize the results of the source
analysis? Do you write your own matlab functions, including font-ends to
fieldtrip plotting functions or you use other freely/commercially available
tools that can import fieldtrip structures or you are satisfied with what is
provided in the fieldtrip toolbox?

2. It seems that the documentation provided on the fieldtrip website is not
very up-to-date and the descriptions of many configuration options in the
*.m files are not documented. At the moment to understand all the available
configuration options, and what different functions are doing and how they
are implemented, I am debugging them step-by-step.
Short of debugging or every time asking questions in this list, is there
another way of getting information about all the available configuration
options for different fieldtrip functions and their implementation details?

3. I found some functions in the fieldtrip's SVN (trunc) version (on
googlecode), which are not available in the daily releases on the ftp server
(e.g. ft_surfacecheck).
Is it safe to use those functions (I understand that the toolbox is released
under GPL)?

4. Are the measurement units used throughout fieldtrip functions basic SI
(International System of Units) units? More specifically, what are the units
of the inputs to ft_dipolesimulation (cfg.dip.signal, cfg.dip.amplitude)?
Are they A*m or nA*m or something else? What are the units of the output
from the minimumnormestimate? A/m?


Thanks in advance

Vahe Poghosyan, Ph.D.
Senior Scientist
Lab. for Human Brain Dynamics
AAI Scientific Cultural Services Ltd.
http://aaiscs.com/LHBD/