MEG-Clinic: A Comprehensive Software Solution for Routine MEG Analysis

Abstract

As the use of Magnetoencephalography (MEG) becomes more prevalent in the clinical setting, the need for an optimized workflow has become imperative. A comprehensive solution will relieve the reliance on the scientist and physician and move the majority of the workload to automated algorithms and a trained technician. The solution will include a user interface that will guide a technician through the entire workflow, while automating steps to reduce the time to reporting. The current workflow includes data acquisition, data conditioning, data analysis and report generation. MEG-Clinic has been developed as an integrated solution using Java and Matlab. This application manages the patient workflow by organizing and displaying those files associated with each patient, while providing a “wrapper” to several existing software packages that provide for data conditioning and analysis. MEG-Clinic lays out the entire workflow, step by step. As the technician completes each step, either by launching a manual process or reviewing the results of an automated process, new data are available for analysis and the next steps can be completed. MEG-Clinic is currently being developed for the Elekta-Neuromag system but could be extended to other MEG systems using appropriate file format conversion. Supported software packages include MaxFilter, MNE, Brainvisa, BrainStorm and Prism. Appropriate functions from these packages are called from MEG-Clinic when needed. If the process is automated (MEG-Clinic runs the process in the background and provides an output), the technician will be required to review the outputs. MEG-Clinic automates several steps of data conditioning, including MaxFilter (signal-space separation), artifact removal (ECG, EOG, etc), data averaging for functional protocols and Elekta FDA Source Analysis. In addition to this data conditioning, MEG-Clinic currently interacts with BrainStorm for final analysis and Prism for final reporting. The ongoing development will include integration of additional analysis programs.