Paris Debriefing

C-day + 62

I just returned a few days ago from the MNE-Python coding sprint in Paris. It was an invigorating experience to work alongside over a dozen of the core contributors to our Python package for an entire week. Putting a face and personality to all of the github accounts I have come to know would have made the trip worthwhile on it's own, but it was also a great experience to participate in the sprint by making some strides toward improving the code library too. Although I was able to have some planning conversations with my GSoC mentors in Paris (discussed later), my main focus for the week was focused on goals tangential to my SSS project.

Along with a bright student in my GSoC mentor’s lab, I helped write code to simulate raw data files.  These typically contain the measurement data directly as they come off the MEEG sensors, and our code will allow the generation of a raw file for an arbitrary cortical activation. It has the option to include artifacts from the heart (ECG), eye blinks, and head movement. Generating this type of data where the ground truth is known is especially important for creating controlled data to evaluate the accuracy of source localization and artifact rejection methods – a focus for many researchers in the MEEG field. Luckily, the meat of this code was previously written by a post-doc in my lab for an in-house project – we worked on extending and molding it into a form suitable for the MNE-Python library. 

The trip to Paris was also great because I was able to meet my main GSoC mentor and discuss the path forward for the SSS project. We both agreed that my time would be best spent fleshing out all the add-on features associated with SSS (tSSS, fine-calibration, etc.), which are all iterative improvements on the original SSS technique. The grand vision is to eventually create an open-source implementation of SSS that can completely match Elekta’s proprietary version. It will provide more transparency, and, because our project is open source, we have the agility to implement future improvements immediately since we are not selling a product subject to regulation. Fulfilling this aim would also add one more brick to the wall of features in our code library.