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• 2017.06.07 - Now you can use keyboard shortcuts during the rating procedure. Check it out how it works!

Automagic

What is Automagic ?

Automagic is a MATLAB based toolbox for preprocessing of EEG-datasets. First, the toolbox automagically removes artifacts (e.g. eye movements, noisy electrodes, etc.) from your raw EEG-data. In a second step, Automagic lets you check visually the entire dataset for remaining artifacts. You will be able to select and remove these manually in an efficient way. Furthermore, you can rate the quality of individual EEG-files.

1. Setup

1.1. System Requirements

You need MATLAB installed and activated on your system to use Automagic. Automagic was developed and tested in MATLAB R2015b and newer releases.

1.2. How to start

There are four different ways of using the application.

1. The easiest and recommended way is to simply install the application from the app installer file automagic.mlappinstall. Please see GUI Manual
2. Automagic is also available as an EEGLab extension and you can use it to preprocess data loaded by EEGLab gui. See Automagic as EEGLab extension
3. You can also use the preprocessing files independent from the gui. See Application structure and How to run the app from the code
4. Or if you wish to make any modifications to any part of the application, be it the gui or the preprocessing part, you can run the application from the code instead of the installer file. See Application structure and How to run the app from the code

2. GUI Manual

2.1. Setup

2.1.1. System Requirements

You need MATLAB installed and activated on your system to use Automagic. Automagic was developed and tested in MATLAB R2015b and newer releases.

2.1.2. Installation

1. Download the Automagic EEG Toolbox to a folder of your choice.
2. Navigate to gui/ folder
3. Double click the file named Automagic or Automagic.mlappinstall. Wait until MATLAB displays a dialogue box.
4. Please select Install. You will be notified as soon as the installation is complete.

2.1.3. How to Run Automagic

1. Start MATLAB.
2. Select the APPS tab.
3. Click on the Automagic icon. You might have to expand the APPS tab to see the Automagic icon by clicking the small triangle pointing down on the far right of the APPS tab.

2.2. Basic Workflow

In this section of the manual, only the basic functionality of Automagic will be explained. This covers the basic workflow from selecting a project to rating the data. Please refer to chapters 3 to 6 for detailed information all functions within the main GUI.

1. Create a new project or load an existing project.
2. Preprocess the data.
3. Rate data and manually select bad channels if any.
4. Interpolate all manually selected channels.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until all data is rated.
   • NOTE: You can not close the main gui window during the preprocessing. If you wish to stop the preprocessing at any time, you can use CTRL-C. In this case, or if by any other reason the preprocessing is stopped before being completely finished, all preprocessed files to that moment will be saved, and you can resume the preprocessing only for the files which are not preprocessed yet. After having used CTRL-C, please load your project from the main gui, by reselecting it from the list of existing projects. This will update the gui with the new preprocessed files.

• Note: Since synchronisation is rather basic, people should never work on the same project simultaneously.

2.3. The Project Panel

2.3.1. Creating a New Project

1. Navigate to the drop-down list labelled Select Project.

2. Select Create New Project...

3. Name your project.

4. Write down the file extension that corresponds to your data file format. For example raw image files (.raw or .RAW), fractal image files (.fif), generic data files (.dat) or even texts (.txt or .asc).

   • In case you choose a text format (.txt, .asc or .csv) , then an edit box below in the window is enabled so that you determine the sampling rate of you recorded data. This information is not necessary for other formats and the edit box is disabled.

5. Choose the EEG System in which your data is recorded. Currently only EGI HCGSN is fully supported for both number of channels 128 and 256 (or 129 and 257 respectively). This information is needed mainly to find channel locations. In case you choose the option Other... for your EEG System, you must provide a file in which channel locations are specified. The file format must be one which is also supported by EEGLab (pop_chanedit function). In addition, you must provide a list of indices of the EOG channels of your dataset. Note that here the list contains the indices of those channels and not their labels (You can also simply deselect the EOG regression and this step will be skipped during the preprocessing).

   • The Channel location file must be the full address of the channel location file.
   • The Channel location file type must specify the type of the file as required by pop_chanedit. eg. sfp
   • Please note that in case you choose Other... as your EEG system, no reduction in number of channels is automatically supported. You can still add manually the list of channels that you want to be discarded from the preprocessing in Exclude Channels field.
   • ICA is supported for Other... only in case your channel labels are as it is required by processMARA. They must be of the form FPz, F3, Fz, F4, Cz, Oz, etc. Otherwise the ICA is simply skipped. If only some of your labels have the required format, only those channels are considered for ICA.
   • If appropriate, check the 10-20 system.
   • A reference channel where all the values are 0s must be provided. If such a channel already exists in your dataset, please choose its index, otherwise, just check the Add a new reference channel and one new channel with 0s everywhere will be added as the last channel of your dataset. For EGI systems it's already assumed that this channel does not exist, hence once is created.

6. You can select or deselect the EOG regression (It is recommended to select it). If you choose Other... for your EEG system then you need to specify the list of EOG channels as well. In the case of EGI automagic already knows the EOG channels and you don't need to specify anything. The list of EOG channels must be integers seperated by space or comma, e.g. 1 32 8 14 17 21 25 125 126 127 128

7. Set the downsampling rate on the manual rating panel. The downsampling only affects the visual representation of your data. A higher downsampling rate will shorten loading times. In general, a downsampling rate of 2 is a good choice.

   • Note: You cannot alter paths, the filtering, or the downsampling rate after creating your project.

8. Specify the path of your data folder. Automagic will scan all folders in your data folder for data files. Files and folders in the data folder will not be altered by Automagic.

   • Note: The data folder must contain a folder for each subject (subject folders). Your data folder should not contain any other kinds of folders since this will lead to a wrong number of subjects.

9. Specify the path of your project folder. If the specified folder does not yet exist, Automagic will create it for you. Automagic will save all processed data to your project folder. By default, Automagic opts for your data folder's path and adds _results to your data folder's name, e.g. \PathDataFolder\MyDataFolder_results\

   • Note: A subject folder must contain EEG files. Automagic can only load data saved in subject folders. Since subject folders are defined as folders in the data folder, no specific naming is required.

10. Choose your filtering parameters in the Filtering panel.
    • Notch Filter: Choose US if your data was recorded in adherence to US standards (60 Hz). Choose EU if your data was recorded in adherence to EU standards (50 Hz).
    • By default a High pass filtering is performed on data. You can change the freuqency or simply uncheck the High pass filtering. You can also choose to have a Low pass filtering. By default there is no Low pass filtering.
11. By clicking on the Configurations... button you can modify additional optional parameters of the preprocessing. This is not necessary, and you can leave it so that the default values are used.
12. Click on Create New in the lower right corner of the project panel to create your new project. If the specified data and project folders do not yet exist, Automagic will now create them for you.

2.3.2. Loading an Existing Project

There are two options to load an existing project. The first option can only be used to open projects that have been created on your system or that have been loaded before:

1. Navigate to the drop-down list labelled Select Project.
2. Select the project you want to load.

The second option can be used to load any Automagic project:

1. Navigate to the drop-down list labelled Select Project.
2. Select Load an existing project...
3. A browser window will open. Navigate to the existing project...s project folder.
4. Select and open the file named project_state.mat

2.3.3. Merging Projects

To merge any number of existing projects without losing the individual projects, please follow these steps:

1. Create a new data folder using Finder (Mac), Explorer (Windows) or your Linux equivalent.
2. Create a new project folder using Finder (Mac), Explorer (Windows) or your Linux equivalent.
3. For all the projects that you want to merge: Copy the contents from the data and project folders to the new data and project folders.
   • Important: Each of your existing project folders contains a file named project_state.mat. Do not copy these files to your new project folder.
4. In Automagic: Create a new project using the newly created data and project folders.

2.3.4. Adding Data to an Existing Project

1. Add subject folders to your data folder using Finder (Mac), Explorer (Windows) or your Linux equivalent.
2. Refresh the Automagic GUI using one of these options:

• Start or restart Automagic.
• Navigate to the drop-down list labelled Select Project and load (or reload) the project containing new data by clicking on its name.

3. The number of subjects and files in both the project panel and the pre-processing panel should now be updated.

2.3.5. Deleting Data from an Existing Project

1. Delete subject folders from your data folder using Finder (Mac), Explorer (Windows) or your Linux equivalent.
2. Refresh the Automagic GUI:

• Navigate to the drop-down list labelled Select Project and load (or reload) the project containing new data by clicking on its name.

3. The number of subjects and files in both the project panel and the pre-processing panel should now be updated.

2.3.6. Deleting a Project

1. Click on Delete Project in the lower right corner of the project panel. A dialog box will appear.
2. Take responsibility by clicking on Delete.
   • Note: This will only delete the file named project_state.mat in the project folder and remove the project from the Automagic GUI. Please use Finder (Mac), Explorer (Windows) or your Linux equivalent to delete your project data and/or project folder.

2.3.7. Customize Settings

After clicking on Configurations... button a new window is opened where you can customize preprocessing steps:

1. In the Filtering section you can choose the order of the filtering. The default value corresponds to the default value computed by pop_eegfiltnew.m.
2. In the Channel rejection criterias you can select or deselect the three different criterias Kurtosis, Probability and Spectrum to reject channels (see pop_rejchan.m). The corresponding thresholds can also be customized.
   • You can additionally choose to have a channel rejection based on the Robust Average Referencing suggested in PREP pipeline. Note that this is a very time consuming operation.
3. ICA can be selected or deselected. Note that ICA and PCA can not be chosen together at the same time. The ICA uses the algorithm in MARA extension of MATLAB.
4. PCA can be selected or deselected. The parameters correspond to paramters of inexact_alm_rpca.m. The default value lambda is where m is the number of channels.
5. The mode of interpolation can be determined. The default value is spherical.
   • Note: The preprocessing parameters can be set only during project creation.

2.4. The Pre-Processing Panel

Click on Run to start the pre-processing of your data. This is the first thing you should do after creating a new project or after adding data to an existing project. Pre-processing includes filtering, detection of bad channels, EOG regression, PCA, and automatic interpolation.

Should the project folder already contain files (i.e. should some of the projects data already have been pre-processed), you will be able to choose whether existing files will be overwritten or skipped after clicking on Run.

2.5. The Manual Rating Panel

Click on Start... to open the rating GUI.

A visualisation of the currently selected file is displayed. Time corresponds to the x-axis, EEG channels correspond to the y-axis. You can use the tools in the top left corner to e.g. magnify an area or select a specific point of the current visualisation. Use the filters right below the tools to focus on a subset of your files based on their rating. You can navigate between files of the current subset by clicking on Previous and Next or by selecting a file from the drop-down list in the top right corner.

You can rate the quality of the visualised data on the very right. You can choose between Good, OK, and Bad. These ratings are subjective and relative rather than absolute: The overall quality of your data should be used as point of reference. The colouring allows you to rate the quality of your data: Ideally, everything is green. Darker colours signify lower quality, i.e. artifacts etc. As a rule of thumb, horizontal artifacts are worse than vertical artifacts of the same size and colouring. After choosing a rating, you will automatically proceed to the next file. Please note that depending on your data and its signal to noise ratio, the color map may need to be modified. On the very bottom right of the window you can select the range of color map [-X, X] where X can be a positive integer between 25 < X < 150. The default range is [-100, 100].

Should you spot bad channels (represented by horizontal lines which are darker than their surroundings), please select Interpolate. This will activate selection mode. Manually navigate to bad channels and select them by clicking on them. Click on Turn off after selecting all bad channels. Click on Next to proceed to the next file. In the next step you will start interpolationg these bad channels and finally you can come back to re-rate these files after interpolating all selected channels.

• Note: Only pre-processed files will be shown for rating.
• Note: Manual rating can be interrupted anytime by closing the rating GUI. No data will be lost and you can resume rating later.

2.5.1 Keyboard Shortcuts

Going through every file of a huge dataset and manually inspecting them can be a very cumbersum task. Keyboard shortcuts can be used to accelerate this inspection in rating window. Using keyboard shortcuts you can rate and/or select the next or previous file:

• Next plot: Rightwards arrow
• Previous plot: Leftwards arrow
• Good rate: G key or 1 key
• OK rate: O key or 2 key
• Bad rate: B key or 3 key
• Interpolate rate: I key or 4 key
• Not Rated rate: N key or 5 key

2.6. The Interpolation Panel

1. Click on Interpolate All to interpolate all channels you selected during manual rating.
2. Refresh the Automagic GUI:
   • Navigate to the drop-down list labelled Select Project and load (or reload) the project containing new data by clicking on its name.
3. Manually re-rate the files that contained bad channels.
   • Note that you can select and interpolate bad channels as often as you want in each file.

3. Automagic as EEGLab extension

You can also run Automagic as an EEGLab extension. To do so, you need to simply put the automagic/ folder in the eeglab_[your-version]/plugins/ folder. After this being done, on start-up, EEGLab will create a new menu item for Automagic. This menu item will have three sub-menus, each of which corresponding to the earlier explained steps of preprocessing:

1. Start Processing... which corresponds to Preprocessing the data
2. Start Manual Rating... which corresponds to Manual rating of bad channels.
3. Start Interpolation... which corresponds to Interpolation of all manually selected channels

The behaviour of the the second and third step is exactly as explained in previous section. The only difference happens for the first step where you can preprocess only the currently selected EEG structure instead of the list of all of your EEG structures loaded in EEGLab.

Also please note that, when using EEGLab, there is no more the notion of having projects, or creating a new project,etc. In this case, you simply load your data from within EEGLab, preprocess, rate and interpolate them, and all the results are given back in ALLEEG structure of the EEGLab. From there you may want to save your result yourself.

• Note: In order to be able to start the preprocessing, you must first add the channel locations to your EEG data strucutre. For more information please see EEGLab documentation on this.

4. Application Structure

There are four main folders (in total 6 folders):

1. automagic/preprocessing/ This folder contains all relevant files of preprocessing step (with no GUIs). The folder is standalone and can be used independent from the entire application. The main function to be called is preprocess.m which needs two arguments. The first argument is the EEG data structure loaded by pop_fileio.m function (or a similar function) of EEGLab and the second argument is preprocessing parameters (see documations, ie. preprocess.m to learn about the second argument). The first ouput of preprocess.m is an EEG data structure similar to the input EEG structure, where the EEG.data field has the preprocessed results. This EEG data streucture has some new fields like the parameters used for preprocessing and channels that have been interpolated by automatic detection. The second output is a figure showing the effects of preprocessing. For more information on how to run the code without installer please see How to run the app from the code.

2. automagic/gui/ This folder contains files created by MATLAB GUIDE. All callback operations related to the gui are implemented here.

   1. main_gui.m is the main function of the project which must be started to run the application.
   2. rating_gui.m is the gui that is accessed from within the main_gui.m and is used to rate subjects and files. You don't need to use this function directly.
   3. settings.m is the gui corresponsing to configuration button on the main gui. It allows to customize the preprocessing steps. Again you don't need to run this file directly.
   4. Automagic.mlappinstall which is the app installer mentionned in Installation section.

3. automagic/src/ This folder contains all source files regarding the entire structure of the application:

   • Project.m, Subject.m and Block.m are classes representing a project created in the gui, its corresponding subjects and the raw files of each subject, respectievly. ConstantGlobalValues.m contains constant variables used throughout the application to avoid duplications.

4. eeglab_plugin/ This folder contains necessary files to integrate Automagic as an EEGLab extension. There are corresponding pop_ functions and equivalent functions of automagic/src/ for the plugin. The structure is very similar to automagic/src/.

5. matlab_scripts/ This folder (must) contain all external files from EEGLab and other libraries.

6. automagic_resources Contains few images and icons for the readme, etc.

5. How to run the application from the code

You can also run Automagic without using the installer. A clear reason to do so is to make your own modifications to the code and then run it.

For this code to be able to run, functions from EEGLab and Augmented Lagrange Multiplier (ALM) Method are needed to be on your path:

1. Download the EEGLab library and put it in the automagic/matlab_scripts folder.
2. Download the inexact ALM ( containing the function [A, E] = inexact_alm_rpca(D, ??)) from (ALM) Method and put it in the automagic/matlab_scripts/ as well.
   • Good News!: If you feel too lazy to download this extension and put it in automagic/matlab_scripts/, don't. While using Automagic, if you choose to use PCA in preprocessing, you will be asked if you agree to download the package, if you answer Yes, the package will be downloaded Automagically in the right folder. Note that this feature is not yet implemented for the previous step, EEGLab.
3. Now you are able to run the code by running the automagic/gui/main_gui.m

• NOTE: If your data is with .fif extension, you need to download fieldtrip which is an EEGLab extension and put it in matlab_scripts/eeglab13_6_5b/plugins/.

Note that you can modify anything in the code if you want and change all files and folder structures including matlab paths.

Contact us

You can find us here. If you have any questions, feedbacks please email us at amirreza [dot] bahreini [at] uzh [dot] ch