Optseq Home Page

Welcome to the Optseq Home Page


optseq2 is a tool for automatically scheduling events for rapid-presentation event-related (RPER) fMRI experiments (the schedule is the order and timing of events). Events in RPER are presented closely enough in time that their hemodynamic responses will overlap. This requires that the onset times of the events be jittered in order to remove the overlap from the estimate of the hemodynamic response. RPER is highly resistant to habituation, expectation, and set because the subject does not know when the next stimulus will appear or which stimulus type it will be. RPER is also more efficient than fixed-interval event related (FIER) because more stimuli can be presented within a given scanning interval at the cost of assuming that the overlap in the hemodynamic responses will be linear. In SPM parlance, RPER is referred to as 'stochastic design'.

The flexibility of RPER means that there are a huge number of possible schedules, and they are not equal. optseq2 randomly samples the space of possible schedules and returns the 'best' one, where the user can control the definition of 'best'. Cost functions include: average efficiency, average variance reduction factor (VRF), and a weighted combination of average and stddev of the VRF. The user can also specify that the first order counter-balancing of the sequence of stimuli be pre-optimized.

Download the Linux version of optseq2.
Download the Linux x86_64 version of optseq2.
Download the MacOSX-PowerPC version of optseq2.
Download the MacOSX-Intel version of optseq2.
Download the Cygwin version of optseq2.

Download a power-point presentation (rper-fmri.ppt) by Doug Greve about event-related design and optseq2. Here's a similar (and less mathematical) presentation (hst583-120402.ppt).

View the optseq2 on-line help page (also available by running optseq2 --help)

View practical exercises for optseq2.