Citation

When citing g-PRIME in any report, the currently published reference is: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/7530

GK Lott, "Hybridizing Cellular and Behavioral Neurobiology with Modern Engineering Tools: Microelectronics, Microfabricated Devices, and Software Solutions for Physiology," PhD Dissertation, Cornell University, 2007

Introduction

g-PRIME is a free windows based software solution for data acquisition and analysis in physiology preparations. It acts as a software oscilloscope, data recording interface, and event/spike detection and analysis suite for both real time and offline data

g-PRIME's functionality extends from the high school classroom to some of the most advanced neurophysiology laboratory environments in the world. The program is designed to span a broad swath of applications from high school biology to university research environments. The software supports a broad swath of data acquisition hardware from your computer sound card to calibrated multi-channel hardware such as the National Instruments DAQ solutions.

The goal for this project is to create a user friendly interface that connects a student or researcher to the behavior of an experimental preparation with as little interpretation as possible. Often, biologists find themselves spending more time manipulating their instrumentation than they do looking at the physiology involved in the system of interest. g-PRIME offers a partial solution to this problem.

This software was written in spring of 2007 by Gus Lott as a component of his Biophysics PhD process at Cornell University. Program code construction details are outlined in his dissertation. This program was written to include many of the functions of previously implemented programs, StimScope and FreqHisto, which were written by Dr. Bruce Land for use in the neurophysiology lab course BioNB 491 taught by Dr. Bruce Johnson.

This program is copyright 2007 Gus Lott. Free distribution is allowed for any and all university research and educational purposes as long as authorship is referenced. Industrial use is prohibited.

Features

• Scope/Acquisition
  • Software Oscilloscope with Multi-Channel support, independent channel zoom and sweep width control from 0.05 to 30 seconds.
  • Spectral visualization with real-time FFT or Spectrogram
  • Reject the DC level of a given sweep for visualization
  • Multiple trigger modes including Continuous, Manual, and Channel Voltage level
  • Advanced gain control to utilize internal pre-amps in data acquisition hardware
  • Stream data to disk in a given file name utilizing the native format from the hardware interface
  • Convert recorded signals into a variety of formats including a raw .txt ASCII file and .wav files for replay in presentations and other applications
• Stimulation
  • Single, double, or tetanic pulse train generation with fixed parameters for stimulus delivery in a variety of environments.
  • Arbitrary signal loading for stimulation supporting a variety of file formats
  • Single Channel signal generation and an associated channel for triggering signal start
  • Operates independently from the acquisition and analysis features
• Analysis
  • Both real-time and offline analysis features
  • Event detection by threshold crossing
  • Real-time thresholds based on amplitude, energy density, and peak frequency component
  • Event triggered correlation with any active channel or file
  • Built in band-pass filters and arbitrary filter coefficient loading
  • Analysis Results
    • Threshold Cross Time
    • Maximum Window Amplitude & Minimum Window Amplitude
    • Time of Max/Min Values
    • Inter-Event Interval/Rate
    • Event Energy Density
    • Frequency of Peak FFT Value
  • Arbitrary Parameter Pair Clustering
  • Parameter Histograms
  • Analysis subset selection and grooming tools
  • Analysis results storage functions for further external analysis
  • Raw event waveform export for external analysis
  • Report generation functions create publication quality graphics