We have implemented a new Flywheel tool, the GE Physio File Converter Gear. It is designed to help users read and summarize the physiological recordings from the GE scanner. This tool may be helpful to you for cases in which you collect PPG and respiratory respiratory data.

In those cases, there will be a file in your acquisition called something like

“24558_4_1_physio.gephysio.zip”

You can use Flywheel to run the Analysis Gear (“CNI GE Physio File Converter”) on your data.

The Gear will synchronize the recorded data to the associated fMRI acquisition. It filters the recorded raw data, finds the peaks in the waveform using the bandpass filter, saves out the waveform as a graph, and summarizes the waveform with various simple statistics.

The output of the Analysis Gear looks like this (click on the Analysis tab to find it):

It includes both tabular and graphical data files that you can view or download. Here is a plot of a portion of the time series of the heart beat signal.

Hua Wu implemented the Gear, which is based on code developed by Dora Hermes (see also https://github.com/vistalab/BrainBeat). We found it useful, in particular for pulling out signals in cases when the pulse oximeter was not well positioned on the subject’s finger and the physiological recordings are noisy.

Onward,
The CNI Team