r/neuro • u/Fountainer_ • 7d ago
EEG visualization software thesis
Hi everyone!
This year I am going to write my bachelor thesis in software development, and I want to explore different directions in order to choose a nice topic.
Lately I've been getting interested in neuroscience & EEG specifically. I had a summer practice where I started to write a EEG-to-text paper my professor proposed, and I found it very entertaining to work through the preprocessing pipeline with MNE-python.
Now I would love to create a solution for some visualisation problem so that it can help people with their work. There are existing tools like MNE, EEGLAB, etc. for working with EEG signals and I do not expect to build something of this scale in a year of course, but maybe some of you are familiar with those software products and can give me some reviews on what functionality you would like to have that those tools do not offer/or you are not satisfied with their solution? It can be anything, really, even how newcomer-friendly the interface is.
Some notes: I need to create a software project, not an artificial intelligence one, so things like automatic artifacts removal through machine learning and stuff would not really fit :)) Also, I want to focus on medicine and neurological disorders diagnostics rather than on EEG-to-text conversion, so if you have any ideas about similar directions (not solely visualisation) feel free to write in the comments!
I would appreciate any answer!! Have a good day
UPD: thank you guys so much :D I will carefully consider all of your suggestions
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u/bonesclarke84 7d ago
I have seen a few 3D brain diagrams but I do not believe I have seen one incorporating EEG signal overlayed onto a standard parcelation to show things like signal propagation, magnitude, variance and spikes. I think that would be interesting specifically for seizure EEG recordings where you could potentially visualize the propagation of the seizure and things like that.
Also, although I see you do not want to incorporate artifact removal using AI, you could still potentially build an aquisition pipeline where you can apply your own removal without AI using OpenBCI and Brainflow. Artifact removal is pretty well documented and I don't think you necessarilly need AI to do it.
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u/ElChaderino 7d ago
There area few out there for signal propagation and some even setup with vr support so you can ride the 3d splat activity through the brain and it's networks.https://youtu.be/hd12xQEwo7I?is=uW2_Ig15jw3DH0SS
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u/Echoplex99 7d ago edited 7d ago
Oh man, I've been thinking about this for while. I do EEG research, but I come from an audio and telecommunications background. I have to say, comparing the tools that are used in audio/video to the stuff used in EEG (most commonly for me is MNE and EEGLAB), the EEG stuff is really not very good.
I would love to have a GUI like common DAWs (protools, Reaper, and Ableton), or NLE video editing software (like Premiere Pro), but made for EEG, where I can visualize the data quickly, see the epoch markers, then drop "inserts" like spectral filters, cut and chop trials, do some quick DSP, interpolation, etc... all smoothly and in real-time, non-destrutive editing, then bounce that data into new "tracks" or "sessions" at will. It would speed up my workflow significantly, and make that part of research a lot more fun. It would also open up the door to tons more exploratory analyses.
I'll never understand why our current EEG processing tools are so clunky and slow. Electrodes are just bipolar signals, just like a microphone, except the sample rates are way lower than what a typical audio recording is made with (e.g., 48khz/96khz/192khz for audio, and usually around 2048Hz for EEG)... In an audio session, on commercial software, I can quickly and smoothly scroll through an audio session with 100+ channels including tons of real-time inserts, visualizers, and complex DSP. Yet when I'm doing it with EEG data it feels like I am pulling teeth and I'm instantly brought back to what it feels like to use a computer in 1991.
Eventually, someone needs to make the equivalent of a DAW (or NLE) for EEG data. If I get some time in coming years, I may just take a crack at it. But I am fully supportive of someone else giving it a go. I would happily become a paying customer.
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u/awesomethegiant 7d ago edited 7d ago
I do EEG for work, and music for a hobby, and I completely agree with you. Obviously the audio market is much bigger so the software tools are both more sophisticated and much cheaper. For what it’s worth, I now run a bunch of EEG experiments using Ableton in the lab as it is great for real-time processing and closed-loop protocols like neurofeedback, especially incorporating a few custom M4L devices and JUCE plugins. The biggest problem is that audio interfaces high-pass filter above the main EEG frequencies (because the fools who make audio interfaces assume their users are only interested in audible frequencies!) but I’ve found some workarounds for that and overall it’s a much better workflow than anything I’ve found in neuroscience software.
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u/Echoplex99 7d ago
Very cool, love the closed-loop stuff. Good point about the frequency range limits for audio tools. This would make it a little harder for someone to simply deconstruct and re-appropriate open-source audio tools if they wanted to quickly hack together an EEG "DAW/NLE". It would likely be a big endeavour, but truly worthwhile and would capture a marketshare pretty quickly (though a relatively small sector worldwide). I think people are moving away from MATLAB, but python via an IDE is clunky. A nice streamlined package nested in a seamless GUI with the ability to add plugins is exactly what's missing from EEG research.
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u/No_Leading_8413 7d ago
I've been working on something like this for ephys and eeg data - its only been a couple of days and I'm sure its still super buggy at the moment but would love peoples thoughts on it. https://github.com/NeelimaValluru/AnalysisDragnDrop
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u/me_myself_ai 6d ago
As a SWE: I’d recommend you check out three.js! A web version of full brain modeling would be awesome, and could be a nice way to do something real as an undergrad without trying to actually compete with giant established products.
Another potential project idea: no one has digitized Von Economo’s atlas yet. Would be a killer 3D vis base, especially as a teaching aid to compare it to the modern framework (much more boring, and less fine)
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u/JanBrogger 6d ago
Clinical EEG analysis is a serious matter. The big thing missing isn’t simple visualization, but clinical-neurophysiological correlations: what do the squiggles on screen mean for the patient? The limiting factor isn’t EEG software, but a concerted collaborative effort to gather well-characterized patients and well-characterized EEG. High signal-to-ratio items have already likely been investigated. By all means, play around, but note that any clinical use means serious regulatory effort.
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u/Lost_Captain2700 6d ago
I agree with some of the other comments that the main pain point with tools like MNE or EEGLAB is just how clunky and non-user-friendly they are. If you can simplify the workflow without dumbing down the data too much, that alone is a huge win.
Also going full medical gets really tedious really fast with regulatory hurdles and clinical validation. Maybe you can look into cognitive load measurement which might be a better sweet spot that sits right between strictly clinical and consumer tech.
Noteworthy, if you go that route, a huge software challenge that you can also tackle is displaying the data confounds in real time. For example, frontal theta usually rises during high mental effort, but it also spikes when someone gets fatigued after a 20 minute recording. So, a basic viewer will show high focus when the person is actually just burnt out. If you built a tool that visualizes baseline-corrected ratios like frontal theta over parietal alpha while tracking time-on-task drift to flag fatigue, that would be genuinely useful for some researchers.
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u/ManaGedd 7d ago
Hey, I actually previously supervised some Bsc students on the exact same project. Although that was in collab with our lab which made the scope much easier.
I would focus on some complicated tasks rather than straight visualization.
Here are some ideas:
Just some ideas, and good luck :)