Welcome to the "fMRI Artefact rejection and Sleep Scoring Toolbox" page

Welcome to the "fMRI Artefact rejection and Sleep Scoring Toolbox" page

The "fMRI Artefact rejection and Sleep Scoring Toolbox", or FASST, is an EEG toolbox developed by researchers from the Cyclotron Research Centre (CRC), University of Liège (ULg), Belgium, with the financial support of the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS, the Queen Elizabeth's funding and the University of Liège.

We wrote these tools to analyze our sleep EEG-fMRI data and tackle three crucial problems:

  • EEG-fMRI. When recording EEG and fMRI data simultaneously, the EEG signal contains, on top of the usual neural and ocular activity, artefacts induced by the gradient switching and high static field of the MR scanner. The rejection of theses artafacts is not easy especially when dealing with brain spontaneous activity, i.e. not evoked responses;
  • Sleep EEG. Reviewing and scoring continuous EEG recordings, such as is common with sleep recordings, is a tedious task as the scorer has to manually browse through the entire data set and give a "score" to each time-window displayed;
  • Continuous EEG. Long multi-channel recording of spontaneous EEG activity is cumbersome to handle as it usually involves displaying, exploring, comparing, chunking, appending data sets sometimes several hours long.

So far a few papers have been produced and published with the of FASST, find the list here. :-)

Currently FASST can efficiently deal with these issues. Specifically, for EEG-fMRI acquisitions, FASST includes the well-known AAS method for the "gradient artefact" rejection, as well as the recently published "constrained ICA" method for the rejection of the "pulse artefact". Other "classic" methods for the "pulse artefact" rejection are also available.

The toolbox is written in Matlab and is specifically compatible with the BrainAmp family of EEG recorders (from BrainProducts GmbH) Three other data formats are now also supported: the edf 'European Data Format', exported raw-EGI data (from Electrical Geodesics, Inc.) and the BCI2000 format.The results are directly compatible with SPM8 and are saved with SPM8 EEG data format. Most of the toolbox was written at the CRC, ULg, Belgium but a few functions were borrowed from 2 other EEG toolboxes: EEGLAB and the FMRIB plug-in for EEGLAB.

We plan to add new features and functionabilities but, in the mean time, we think that the current set of tools could be of use for other researchers and applications too.

For more details and explanations about this toolbox, please check the manual.

The toolbox is available for free, under the GNU-GPL 2, after completing a brief registration form. Obviously we will not be selling nor giving those informations to anybody but we need them for two practical reasons:

  • - "No money, no research, no toolbox". Having statistics about the number of users will help us for future grant applications;
  • - we wish to let you know of bug fixes and future updates when they come up.

 

The main download contains the latest updates of the toolbox. We are now using another distribution channel (via GitHub) so that the online verison is always the latest one.

For any queries, bug report, comments, support,... contact us at: jschrouff_at_ulg.ac.be, d.coppieters_at_ulg.ac.be and c.phillips_at_ulg.ac.be.

Thanks again for your interest in our work!

Jessica Schrouff, Dorothée Coppieters & Christophe Phillips

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