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I have started to do some research on EEG analysis. One of the challenging things I have found is the variability on the formats for the EEG files.

What do you do when you receive data your software does not support? Is it reasonable to ask the collaborators to convert the data to another format? Do you modify your software to incorporate the details of the new format?

Is there out there any EEG format that is consider standard? Do the EEG manufacturers provide converters to that format in their software?



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If you will say what is the format of your data exectly it will be more easy to help you. – sviter Apr 5 '14 at 15:21
My point is that I have data coming in many different formats. The current one is .eeg (coming from nicolet machines). – drio Apr 6 '14 at 14:26

As far as I know, short answer is no - there is no gold standard for EEG files. But EEG is a time series (amplitude) from several channels. So the most common way to represent it is columns as electrodes and rows as points of time. I think almost all software is possible to read such structure as txt file. But EEG is not only time series. Usually it is important to have additional channel with event markers. It make the situation a little bit tricky. But usually popular software is able to read most of EEG data formats and it's not difficult to write a custom function for reading your data.

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Thanks. It is easy if you have a specification of the format you are dealing with. But if that is the case, then that file type is probably supported by the different egg analysis open source projects. I assume not all the company provide details of their file formats? – drio Apr 7 '14 at 1:56
Look at this script. Maybe it will work for you. But I think you may contact with manufacturer for specification of your data file. – sviter Apr 7 '14 at 5:30
Thank you sviter, that's useful. – drio Apr 7 '14 at 15:31
Here are some tutorials on how you can use FieldTrip to load different types of EEG data. – Robin Kramer Jul 22 at 9:47

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