[FieldTrip] Wrap up your Fieldtrip scripts into EEGLAB plugin menu items

Arnaud Delorme arnodelorme at gmail.com
Tue Oct 8 18:29:27 CEST 2019


This message has been approved by Fieldtrip highest instances :-).

EEGLAB and Fieldtrip have a long joint history. In 2003-04, We worked together with Robert Oostenveld to provide basic source localization to EEGLAB via the EEGLAB DIPFIT plug-in using Matlab code Robert had developed during his thesis. Together with many other functions written at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior, the source code contributed by Robert Oostenveld to DIPFIT served as a basis for Fieldtrip which was first released by the Donders Institute in 2005. We have been collaborating ever since.

Recently, we have strengthened the link between the two toolboxes by reprogramming the functions eeglab2fieldtrip and fieldtrip2eeglab (https://sccn.ucsd.edu/wiki/EEGLAB_and_Fieldtrip). This allows to robustly go back and forth between EEGLAB and Fieldtrip data structures. In particular, because of our historical collaboration, EEGLAB channels locations may be conveniently aligned with Fieldtrip head models from the EEGLAB graphic interface, allowing to leverage the full capabilities of Fieldtrip source reconstruction methods on EEGLAB datasets.

We have created a simple template that takes an EEGLAB data, perform the coregistration with a standard Fieldtrip BEM model, and apply eLoreta for ERP analysis. We believe this template could be modified by some of you to create other plugins.

https://github.com/sccn/erpsource

The long term sustainability of EEGLAB and Fieldtrip relies on the contribution of new methods by the community for advanced MEEG processing.

Making your Fieldtrip code available as an EEGLAB plugin (there are more than 100 plugins to date) will make it visible to the EEGLAB community. You can submit a plugin on this web page (https://sccn.ucsd.edu/eeglab/plugin_uploader/upload_form.php) and once approved, it becomes instantaneously visible by all EEGLAB users and available directly in the EEGLAB graphic interface (according to our statistics on Mixpanel 150,000 to 200,000 EEGLAB sessions are started each month from about 10,000 to 20,000 unique users). Plugins are ranked by number of download and there is also a rating/commenting system in place for each plugin. The quarterly EEGLAB newsletter sent to 15,000 researchers also features new plugins upon request from their author, which might help with adoption of your method and citation of your paper(s).

Do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions,

Arnaud Delorme


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