RELACS - Enjoy your recordings

Thursday, 23 July 2009 13:16

RELACS (Relaxed ELectrophysiological data Acquisition, Control, and Stimulation) is a fully customizable software platform for data acquisition, online analysis, online spike detection and stimulus generation maximizes the yield of your experiments and specifically designed for (but not limited to) electrophysiological recordings. This program offers many features;

Closed loop experiments that may considerably speed up this traditional approach and in addition offers novel experimental possibilities on both the stimulus time-scale (> 10 ms) and the sampling time-scale (< 1 ms), i.e. dynamic clamp;
A hardware independent modular design;
Automatic annotation (and storage) of the data with metadata.

and in addition provides;

C++ plugins for powerful flexibility;
Data-analysis library.

Plugins play an important role in RELACS. They adapt RELACS to specific hardware drivers and they allow you to implement experimental protocols, filters, spike detectors, etc. The plugins can be grouped into high-level plugins and device plugins. RELACS comes with an extensive set of data-analysis functions. The functions are implemented in C++ to allow fast and memory efficient data-analysis as it is required for closed-loop experiments, e.g.:

Basic statistics (mean, standard deviation, median, correlation ...);
Spectral analysis: power spectrum, transfer function, coherence;
Linear and nonlinear fits (Levenberg-Marquardt and Simplex);
Peak detection;
Histograms, interpolation;
Stimulus generation: pulse, saw tooth, band-pass filtered white noise, Ornstein-Uhlenbeck noise;
...and many others!

RELACS completely hides all specific hardware details behind the scenes. Therefore experimental protocols can be implemented independently of the hardware used at a particular experimental setup (data acquisition board, attenuator, temperature sensors, motorized micromanipulators). This allows to use the very same experimental protocols for all your different experimental setups in your lab, no matter what particular hardware is used. Furthermore, this offers the unique possibility to share experimental protocols with other labs. Currently, an implementation based on RTAI real-time Linux and Comedi for accessing data acquisition boards is provided. For more information, click here.