EEG-Beats

Matlab toolbox to analyze heart rate variability (HRV) from EKG measured with an EEG Sensor

This MATLAB toolbox extracts heartbeat peaks and interbeat interval measures from a single channel of EEG that has been recorded by placing an EEG sensor on the upper portion of the chest. Scripts provide automated processing for all .set files in a directory tree. An EEGLAB plugin is also available. EEGLAB is required for EEG-Beats even if not run as a plugin.

Citing EEG-Beats

EEG-Beats is freely available under the GNU General Public License. Please cite the following publication if using:

Thanapaisal S, Mosher S, Trejo B and Robbins KA (2020)
EEG-Beats: Automated analysis of heart rate variability (HVR) from EEG-EKG
https://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.07.21.211862v1

Running EEG-Beats as an EEGLAB plugin:

1. Install the plugin through the EEGLAB Extension Manager (File -> Manage EEGLAB Extensions)

   Alternatively you can directly unzip eegbeats.1.1.2.zip in the EEGLAB plugins directory.

2. Load an EEG .set file into EEGLAB

3. Run EEG-Beats through the EEGLAB Tools menu.

Running EEG-Beats on the command line:

1. Install EEG-Beats as above.
2. EEG-Beats is designed to be run in two stages:
   a. Extract the heartbeats from the EEG
   b. Compute RR measures from the heartbeats.

Top-level functions

EEG-Beats has four top level functions:

1. eeg_beats takes an EEG .set file and produces a structure containing the heartbeat peaks.
2. eeg_ekgstats takes the peak structure produced by eeg_beats and produces an interbeat interval measure structure.
3. eegplugin_eegbeats provides the EEGLAB plugin infrastructure and is not meant to be called directly by users.
4. pop_eegbeats performs the entire process in one step. The EEGLAB plugin calls this function, but it also can be called from user scripts or from the command line.

Running EEG-Beats from scripts

The scripts subdirectory has an extensive collection of scripts that are designed to call EEG-Beats in batch mode on an entire study. A detailed list of scripts appears in the README.md file located in this subdirectory.

Setting EEG-Beats parameters

All parameters in EEG-Beats are settable. EEG-Beats uses a params structure to hold the parameters. The following functions are useful for listing the values of the parameters and setting them.

Example The following command on the command line lists all EEG-Beat parameters and their default settings.

outputBeatDefaults(); 

Example The following example creates an empty params structure, sets the rrMinMs parameter to 400 ms and, then fills the structure with the default values for all other parameters.

params = struct();
params.rrMinMs = 400;
params = checkBeatDefaults(params, params, getBeatDefaults());

Releases

Version 1.1.2 Released 9/04/2020

• Removed extra line in plugin GUI
• Minor changes in documentation

Version 1.1.1 Released 8/25/2020

• Removed figure saving from pop_eegbeats
• Removed return figures from eeg_beats
• Removed ar and fft options for spectrum

Version 1.1.0 Released 8/21/2020

• EEG-Beats with EEGLAB plugin gui

Version 1.0.0 Released 7/28/2020

• Initial release of EEG-Beats sans EEGLAB plugin gui