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Starting a New Study

This section of the manual highlights steps required to start a new protocol with the bossapp RESEARCH. These are the minimal steps required for a basic study and do not include steps for including additional devices, presentation software and task integration, or other advanced protocols.

This section does not include hardware setup and assumes correct installation and setup prior.

Helpful Questions to ask when starting a study

  • What is my signal of interest? Which oscillation and where on the scalp are I measuring it?
  • Which electrodes will I need to detect my oscillation of interest? Will I record from all electrodes and only define a few to detect my oscillation? Or only record from the electrodes needed for my oscillation? How will I weight the electrodes?
  • Will I be able to readily detect this oscillation as defined in most people?
  • Do I want to hit peaks, troughs, randomly, or a combination? What are my stimulation conditions? Do I need to start/stop based on an external marker?
  • Which devices will I need to send triggers to? (TMS machine, EEG datastream, external devices, presentation software, etc.) Do they take binary TTLs through BNC ports or 8-bit triggers through DB25 or other ports? Will I need USB to TTL adapters for my computers or trigger boxes for my EEG systems? Do I have the trigger cables required if needed?

Setting up your EEG Recording Software Protocol

Set up your EEG recording software files and parameters on the control or operator PC before setting up your bossapp RESEARCH files and parameters. Using your amplifiers instructions, make an appropriate protocol in the software. Insure that you have included the electrodes of interest, any other electrodes required by the system (including ground and ref), or set ground and ref appropriately for your configuration and TMS placement. Pay careful attention to the channel indices and check to make sure they have the correct mapping to the cap you are using. If your system allows you to adjust additional parameters such as hardware filters, ac/dc recording, etc. follow the manual to ensure that they are set appropriately for simultaneous EEG and TMS. If your system includes a separate real-time out section, populate it with only the channels you want to send to the bossdevice. Ensure that all AUX and trigger/marker channels are indexed after the EEG channels with any trigger channel as the last channel. If you have questions about designing your EEG protocol for your EEG recording software, please reach out to your EEG vendor for support.

Although the bossdevice can work with multiple EEG sampling rate. A sampling rate of 5kHz is highly recommended to work with the bossdevice RESEARCH. If you set a higher sampling rate on your EEG recorder, additional EEG data packets will be ignored, and lower sampling rates might lead to poorer phase estimation results.

Setting up your bossapp EEG Configuration

The recommended and easiest method to create the EEG configuration within the bossapp is to go the the "EEG" tab, "Configuration" subtab and click "Load". Then navigate to the saved protocol you made for your EEG recording software and open it within the bossapp. The bossapp will automatically pull the information from that file to make your bossapp EEG configuration. This method is highly recommended as it preserves the channel indices and pulls out the information needed for the "Main Settings" box which may not be readily available.

This method will populate all channels into the "Spatial Filter Weights" table. If there are more channels included than you need for your signal of interest, you can set their weights to zero or delete them from the table. All deleted channels are set to weights of zero by the system.

Set the weights for your channels of interest to define the weighted average signal the the bossapp will use to predict your oscillation. Values can be positive or negative.

Once your bossapp EEG Configuration is complete, save it with a descriptive name that includes "bossapp EEG Config" as it will be saved as a MATLAB file and will not be readily discernable from other MATLAB files, including the protocol file for the bossapp.

It is also possible to create the bossapp EEG Configuration from scratch without the reference file describe above. To do this, please follow the instructions in the Configuration Subtab section of the "EEG Tab" page of this manual. It is important to make sure the channel indices match between the EEG software and the bossapp research. It is also important to note the specific requirements for different EEG systems.

Setting up your bossapp Protocol

Navigate to the "Protocol" tab and use the Protocol Tab page to walk through each column in the table. For each condition in the protocol, you will need to decide or define the following:

  1. "Name" - The name of the condition
  2. "Autostart?" - If the condition should automatically start when the previous condition concludes.
  3. "Trigger Configuration" (which types of triggers, how many, and when)
  4. "Num Cycles" - How many times should this condition run? (How many cycles of stimulation when conditions are met?)
  5. Which oscillations should be targeted. You can require just one of the three oscillations to be present and meet your targeting criteria or up to all 3 oscillations. These selections are inclusive, if you check "Enable Alpha" and "Enable Beta", the system will only fire when both Alpha and Beta are present to your requirements. If you want to target Alpha and then target Beta, you will need to make separate conditions. To choose an oscillation, check the box in the respective "Enable Oscillation" column.
  6. Once you have enabled the oscillation(s) you want to target, double click the "Oscillation Target" cell to open and define your target. This will open a pop-up where you input where in the oscillation you want to target (such as peaks or troughs) and the tolerance (how far from the target phase is acceptable). Do this for each oscillation you have enabled. You may leave any unused oscillations at defaults.
  7. If you are using an external process to start a condition, you can define which 8-bit TTL initiates the condition in "Condition Activation marker". If you only want to target during certain windows, even if conditions are met outside of those windows, you can input the start and stop of those windows in the "Remote Enable/Disable" columns.
  8. If you need a minimum amount of time between triggers, even if criteria are met, you can define this in the Parameters box on the top right of the "Protocol" tab. You can also define a minimum pulse width here and a marker which, when received, will stop the current condition and start the following condition.

Default phase is 0 and default tolerance is pi

You must define the target and tolerance for each oscillation used in each condition for each protocol.