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Junior Member
 
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Last Login: 6/1/2010 9:37:26 AM
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Could anybody explain to me how they have their computer running ePrime to the scanner to record/sync with the paradigm? For the life of me I cannot find a cable that I need to connect the two. Everyone I contact has been less than helpful including tech support (who said that they neither make a cable nor know of someone that could provide one that they endorse). Anyone's help at this point would be helpful.
Thanks
KL
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Forum MVP
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Last Login: 5/17/2012 5:46:13 PM
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KL,
I think the connection depends a lot on your particular fMRI setup, so I don't know that my experience is any help, but here goes.
We have a GE scanner that provides a copy of the RF pulse through a BNC cable. You have to talk to your scanner manufacturer to find out where that comes from your scanner, even I don't know where it comes from our scanner since someone else put the cable in place before I got there.
We also have a Fiber Optic Button Response System (BRS) from PST, which plugs into the serial port or USB port of a task computer and acts like either an SRBox or keyboard. We plug the RF pulse copy from the scanner into the trigger input (BNC) on the BRS. Whenever the BRS gets a pulse from the scanner it sends a character to the computer (by default a {^}, but we changed the keyboard output to {/} just because I was testing some programs with a version of E-Prime that could not interpret shifted characters from the keyboard).
Now in E-Prime, where we want to sync the task to the scanner, we just put in a "Get Ready" TextDisplay or ImageDisplay object and set its input mask to wait for the trigger character from the SRBox or keyboard, which in turn comes from the BRS, which gets triggered by the pulse over the BNC cable from the scanner system.
Before all this we had an Integrated Functional Imaging System (IFIS) system from PST (since then PST has unloaded IFIS to MRI Devices Corporation, which is now Invivo Corporation). That system required no connection to the scanner computer, which I thought pretty clever. Instead it had a radio receiver that went into the scanner room along with some other equipment. The receiver would detect the actual RF pulse and send a signal through some digital I/O equipment to the computer, and E-Prime was just programmed (using Package Calls provided by IFIS) to detect that signal.
-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder
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Forum Newbie
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Last Login: 3/9/2012 5:23:20 AM
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Excellent answer Dave.
We are migrating away from Parallel Ports to ..well anything else. Knowledge of anything that EPrime can use that is not the Paralllel port is very valuable!
Many thanks,
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