Import .ds format files

💬 Support & Discussions
1

Dear all,

I recently installed mne in my PC in order to process MEG data. Please could you inform which are the suitable commands in order to import my data which have a ds format?

Thank you in advance.
G.K.

2

hi,

here is a tutorial using CTF data:

https://mne.tools/stable/auto_tutorials/io/60_ctf_bst_auditory.html

Alex

3

Hi Alexandre,

Thank you for your response. I 've seen this tutorial.
I have a .ds folder which includes many different types of files (e.g. ACQ, HC, HIST), and I can’t find a way to read them in Python. Is it necessary to convert the folder in a convenient format, like fif?

Thank you,
G.K.

4

hi,

we have maybe never had this need in mne-python

if you share a file or give us a link to a similar file on the web we can
see how to update the reader to be able to read this file

Alex

5

The typical mne read_raw function will incorporate the loading of those files. The CTF format uses a folder style to incorporate the same/similar information that is in the binary .fif format. If you load the data using MNE it will pull in all of the pertinent information from the folder.

ds_fname = 'sub-ON02747_ses-01_task-airpuff_run-06_meg.ds'
raw = mne.io.read_raw_ctf(ds_fname, preload=True)

#Other possible helpful arguments are: 
# system_clock='ignore'
# clean_names=True

The hist file incorporates the history of processing (probably not super important if you are loading raw data). The .hc file list the information on the head coil localization, which is loaded with the raw file. If you want to look at either of these files, they are just text files and you can just open them in any text editor. The main data matrix is in the .meg4 file, but needs information from the other files like ACQ to be informative (mne takes care of this).

Hope this is helpful.

6

Hi,

Thank you for your response. All these information are really helpful.
I had to notice that the names of the files included in the ds folder had different name than the folder.

Georgia