We provide tools for sharing data containing brain activity and behavioral information. These tools can be used to read the Neuroshare files hosted at http://brainliner.jp/, our web portal for sharing brain and behavioral data for neuroscience.

On http://brainliner.jp, both Matlab (v7.3) and Neuroshare files are available for download. To read Neuroshare files, we recommend you use our Matlab Neuroshare library.

Matlab Neuroshare Library

Introduction

Researchers all around the world do experiments/studies about brain activity. However, since data formats aren’t standardized between programs and researchers, data and analysis programs for data cannot be easily shared.

Thus a common file format would facilitate sharing data and data-analysis programs. We selected a common file format that can contain several types of neurophysiological data as part of an infrastructure for data sharing that we are developing.

The tools for the common file format that we are developing are available here on this page.

Common File Format

The common file format of brain-behavior data should have flexibility so that it can contain several types of neurophysiological data.

We selected Neuroshare as the common file format.

What’s Neuroshare?

Neuroshare is a file format created to standardize methods for sharing neurophysiological data by Neuroshare Project (http://neuroshare.sourceforge.net/). It consists of header information and data that are arranged such that any arbitrary amount of data can be stored.

Why Neuroshare?

Neuroshare can contain several types of neurophysiological data because of its high flexibility, including analog time-series data and neuronal spike timing. Some applications have plug-ins or libraries available that can read Neuroshare format files, thus making Neuroshare somewhat readily usable.

What do we provide?

Neuroshare can contain several types of neurophysiological data, but there were no easy tools to convert data into the Neuroshare format, so we made and are providing a Neuroshare Converter Library and Simple Converter using the library.

In future work we will make and provide many more useful tools for data sharing.

History

2012.04.04  Update ns_CreateFile, Update ns_Converter
2011.12.14 Update ns_Reader, ns_ReaderManual is released
2011.08.24  Update ns_Converter
2011.07.01 ns_ConverterManual is released
2011.05.30  Update ns_CreateFile
2011.05.17 Update ns_Converter
2011.04.27  Update ns_Converter
2011.04.01 Update ns_Converter, ns_Reader
2011.03.10 Update ns_Converter, ns_Reader
2011.03.07  Update ns_CreateFile
2010.11.22  ns_Reader v1.0 is released
2010.10.05  Update ns_CreateFile
2010.09.07  Creation of this page in English

Download

• Neuroshare Convert Library

[download id=”2507″ format=”4″]

• Simple Converter using the library

[download id=”2523″ format=”4″]

• Neuroshare Read Functions

[download id=”2533″ format=”4″]

Documents

• [download id=”2471″ format=”5″]
• [download id=”2469″ format=”5″]

• [download id=”2531″ format=”5″]
• [download id=”2527″ format=”5″]

• [download id=”2535″ format=”5″]
• [download id=”2541″ format=”5″]

Copyright

Our tools are free but copyrighted software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence as published by the Free Software Foundation. Further details on “copyleft” can be found at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/. No formal support or maintenance is provided or implied.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Strategic Research Program for Brain Sciences(SRPBS) from MEXT, Japan (http://brainprogram.mext.go.jp/).

Also, ‘Multineuronal Research Resource’ Project Group of the research grant program by MEXT, ‘Integrative Brain,’ collaborated with us.