1. What did you do this week?
This week's primary work related to work I started in my second week of GSoC. There I was starting to convert MNE-Python's "somato" dataset to the BIDS standard, so that I can use it as an easy test case for improving BIDS-MNE-pipelines.
That work was then halted, because we realized that some files could not yet be saved according to the BIDS standard, because the specification does not cover them (as of yet).
Thanks to an idea by Alex, this week was dedicated to implement code that can quickly recalculate all files, without having to save them --> thus, we achive full BIDS compatibility.
Let's have a concrete summary in bullet points:
- When handling MEG data, we are often dealing with three different coordinate systems
- One system to specify the head of the study participant
- One system to specify the sensors of the MEG machine
- One system that specifies the MRI scan of the study participants head
- For source-space analyses, we need to align these coordinate system in a process called coregistration
- The coregistration is achieved through transformation matrices, which specify how points have to be rotated and translated to fit from one system into the other
- In MNE-Python, these transformation matrices are called `trans` ... and currently, there is no fixed way in BIDS, how/where to save these as files
- In BIDS however, we DO know how to save anatomical landmarks such as the Nasion, and left and right preauricular points
- Thus, we simply save all of the points in their respective coordinate systems, and then call a function that calculates the `trans` by fitting the points to each other
Sounds more straight forward than it turned out to be, and I spent nearly the whole week wrapping my head around concepts, private functions, improving docs, and implementing the necessary code.
It's still not completely finished, by we are getting close.
2. What is coming up next?
Next week, I hope to finalize the work on coordinate systems and transformations. Then I will finally start to make a BIDS version of the mne-study template. Perhaps starting with the first steps, instead of tackling all steps (including source localization) at the same time.
I realized that currently the mne-study-template is quite MEG centric. I will see whether that will make me run into problems.
3. Did you get stuck anywhere?
I got stuck at several points while working out coregistration, as is documented in several posts I made:
Luckly, I received lots of helpful comments by Mainak, Eric, and Alex ... so I made some progress regardless of the challenges. :-)