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EEGLAB
Current version: 9
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New!
EEGLAB workshop (November 18-22)
in San Diego, CA


  What is EEGLAB?

EEGLAB is an interactive Matlab toolbox for processing continuous and event-related EEG, MEG and other electrophysiological data incorporating independent component analysis (ICA), time/frequency analysis, artifact rejection, event-related statistics, and several useful modes of visualization of the averaged and single-trial data. First developed on Matlab 5.3 under Linux, EEGLAB runs on Matlab v5 and higher under Linux, Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X (Matlab 7 recommended).

  Why EEGLAB?

EEGLAB provides an interactive graphic user interface (GUI) allowing users to flexibly and interactively process their high-density EEG and other dynamic brain data using independent component analysis (ICA) and/or time/frequency analysis (TFA), as well as standard averaging methods. EEGLAB also incorporates extensive tutorial and help windows, plus a command history function that eases users' transition from GUI-based data exploration to building and running batch or custom data analysis scripts. EEGLAB offers a wealth of methods for visualizing and modeling event-related brain dynamics, both at the level of individual EEGLAB 'datasets' and/or across a collection of datasets brought together in an EEGLAB 'studyset.' For experienced Matlab users, EEGLAB offers a structured programming environment for storing, accessing, measuring, manipulating and visualizing event-related EEG data. For creative research programmers and methods developers, EEGLAB offers an extensible, open-source platform through which they can share new methods with the world research community by contributing EEGLAB 'plug-in' functions that appear automatically in the EEGLAB menu for those who download them. For example, novel EEGLAB plug-ins might be built and released to 'pick peaks' in ERP or time/frequency results, or to perform specialized import/export, data visualization, or inverse source modeling of EEG, MEG, and/or ECOG data.

  EEGLAB main features

  Required Resources

Matlab 7.0 or later running under any operating system (Linux, Windows, Unix, Macintosh). EEGLAB will also work on Matlab 6.5 or earlier although some rare function may crash due to lack of backward compatibility. Matlab 5.3 is not supported any more. A large amount of RAM is useful - at least 512 MB (1-4 GB recommended for processing more than 32 channels). The Matlab Signal Processing toolbox is also recommended. Although EEGLAB incorporates functions to supplement functions from this toolbox (e.g., for filtering and power spectra), they are not as efficient. Component clustering functions, introduced in EEGLAB 5.0b, also uses functions from the Matlab Statistics toolbox.

  EEGLAB Resources
 

 

  EEGLAB Wiki section
 

 


  Search the EEGLAB web site or email discussion list archive

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Search EEGLAB Search eeglablist
         
  EEGLAB Statistics

EEGLAB is a collection of about 400 Matlab functions comprising a total of 50,000 program lines, plus a 300-page EEGLAB tutorial manual. To our knowledge, 21 user-initiated plug-ins have been developed for EEGLAB. Researchers from at least 88 country domains have downloaded toolbox files. Currently, EEGLAB files are downloaded 30-40 times per day, and over 3,500 researchers participate in the EEGLAB email discussion list.

  EEGLAB Workshops

The First EEGLAB Workshop was held Oct. 28-30, 2004 at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD, La Jolla CA. The Second EEGLAB Workshop was held September 17-19, 2005 at the University of Porto, Portugal. The Third EEGLAB Workshop was held in Singapore, November 15-18, 2006. The Fourth EEGLAB Workshop was held near Toulouse, France, June, 2007. The Fifth EEGLAB Workshop was held near UCSD, La Jolla CA in November, 2007. The Sixth EEGLAB Workshop in Santiago, Chile in December, 2007. The Seventh EEGLAB Workshop was held at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana in April 2009, the eighth again in Aspet, France, in June 2009. The ninth was held in Australia in late 2009; the Tenth through Twelfth workshops will take place in 2010, first in Jyväskylä, Finland (in June), in Taiwan (September), and in La Jolla (following the Society for Neuroscience meeting in November). Inquire about or help plan or host future workshops.

  EEGLAB Development

The chief EEGLAB developers are Arnaud Delorme and Scott Makeig. The predecessor to EEGLAB, the ICA/EEG Toolbox (1997-2001), comprised functions written by Makeig with Colin Humphries, Sigurd Enghoff, Tzyy-Ping Jung, Te-Won Lee, and Tony Bell, and was first released on the Web in 1997 at the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory of Terrence J. Sejnowski at The Salk Institute, La Jolla. The first version of the integrated EEGLAB toolbox was written there by Delorme and Makeig with subsequent contributions by many including Marissa Westerfield, Jörn Anemüller, Luca Finelli, Robert Oostenveld, Hilit Serby, Toby Fernsler, Nima Shamlo Bigdeley, Jason Palmer and many others. Dedicated beta testers include Andreas Romeyke (and his team) who developed a test suite for EEGLAB, and also advanced users including Stefan Debener. EEGLAB development is now centered at the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience (SCCN) of the Institute for Neural Computation at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Core EEGLAB maintenance and development is supported by the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).

We welcome collaborations with users and open source developers to expand and improve EEGLAB functions and/or to independently write and release EEGLAB plug-in applications and environments. If you have written plug-ins for use in your laboratory, please consider releasing them for use by others. Available EEGLAB plug-ins are listed here. A number of them are included in the EEGLAB release.

Plug-ins and open source development: EEGLAB is under active open-source development. Together with its user/developers, we are extending its capabilities to include resources including across-subject statistics and component clustering, cluster computing, and component source localization. User-contributed features and suggestions are welcome (see Add to EEGLAB). We encourage and plan to interconnect EEGLAB with other Matlab-compatible toolboxes. To participate in open-source development of EEGLAB, see Add to EEGLAB and/or email us at eeglab@sccn.ucsd.edu.

HeadIT: An allied NIMH-sponsored project to create a Human Electrophysiology, Anatomic Data, and Integrated Tools (HeadIT) resource is underway. We expect a beta version of the HeadIT data archiving, management, sharing, and open distribution software system to be made available in late 2010.

ERICA: An allied SCCN project is creating an integrated suite of software for Experimental Realtime Interactive Control and Analysis (ERICA) of EEG and multimodal experiments, particularly those incorporating interactive data-adaptive stimulus / feedback control (BCI, neurofeedback, cognitive monitoring, videogame-like protocols, social neuroscience experiments, etc.). To learn more about ERICA, write to eeglab@sccn.ucsd.edu.

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