Abstract
In vivo electrophysiology experiments require the collection of data from multiple subjects, often for extended periods. Studying multiple subjects for extended periods can be made more efficient through simultaneous recordings, but scaling up recordings to accommodate larger numbers of subjects simultaneously requires coordination and consideration of costs and flexibility. To facilitate this process, we have developed OpBox, an open source set of tools to acquire electroencephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG) flexibly from multiple rodent subjects simultaneously. OpBox combines open source hardware and software with off-the-shelf components to create a system that costs less than commercial solutions ($500 per subject), and can be easily deployed for multiple subjects. Coded in MATLAB, OpBox scripts can simultaneously and flexibly collect and display multiple analog and digital data streams, for instance real-time EEG and EMG, event triggers from a behavioral system, and rotary encoder data. OpBox also calculates and displays real-time spectral representations and event-related potentials (ERPs). To verify the performance of our system, we compare our amplifiers with two other commercial amplifiers, a Grass P55 AC preamplifier and an Intan RHD2000-series amplifier. The OpBox amplifier performs comparably to commercial amplifiers for signal to noise ratios, noise floors, and common mode rejection. We also demonstrate that our acquisition system can reliably record multi-channel data from multiple subjects, and has been successfully tested with 12 subjects running simultaneously on a single standard desktop computer. Together, OpBox increases the flexibility and lowers the cost for simultaneous acquisition of electrophysiology data from multiple subjects.
Significance Statement Current commercial solutions for electrophysiology recordings in awake, behaving animals can be relatively expensive, inflexible, or challenging to interface with custom-built equipment. Here we describe the development of OpBox, an open source set of hardware and software to perform simultaneous acquisition of EEG and EMG signals from multiple behaving subjects. Together with off-the-shelf data acquisition systems, OpBox increases flexibility and lowers the cost for the simultaneous acquisition of electrophysiology from multiple behaving subjects.
Footnotes
Authors report no conflict of interest
EYK received funding from NIH (R03AG050878, K08MH116135). JP received funding from William M. Wood Foundation, Bank of America Trustee. SSC received funding from NIH (U01NS098968, 5K24NS088568, 5R01NS062092).
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
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