Visualization of .puls files

[aishaejazz]

Hi, I only have 2 .puls files for all my subjects that i've been asked to visualize using the TAPAS toolbox. I don't know from which system they were acquired from or what to put in as parameters. Is this information important for me to do anything with the data even if i just want to see what the data looks like? More importantly, is it only possible to work with .puls files or do i need more going forward?

Thanks.

[mrikasper]

Dear @aishaejazz,

Typically, .puls files are from the Siemens system, acquired via ideaCmdTool manual recording. You could open them with any text editor to confirm the structure that is described in our wiki.

If that is the case, the .puls file in particular is the peripheral pulse unit (PPU) data to monitor the cardiac cycle. You could follow the Siemens_VB example in the PhysIO Toolbox and just enter the cardiac logfile as the .puls.

I hope that helps!

All the best,
Lars

[aishaejazz]

Hi,
Thank you very much for your valuable feedback. As you suggested, i ran the Siemens_VB example, in particular the syn_first spm job file and put in my .puls file as the cardiac logfile input. Additionally, I erased all other parameters considering i only had the one file to move forward with. One of the outputs i obtained was a regular cardiac cycle image which was great but as i put in my other subjects files the output seemed weird and unlike the first cardiac image i got. Is this due to the data that i have or some other parameters i need to modify to get a cardiac pulse image as an output?

[mrikasper]

Dear @aishaejazz

Which of the two plots do you find weird? The second one looks actually OK from my end, but you will have to use a horizontal zoom on it to see it for a shorter time period (10-20s) to check whether it is tracking the pulses correctly.

I hope that helps.

All the best,
Lars

[aishaejazz]

Dear Kasper,
Thank you so much for your help so far. I guess my question to you was, why do the outputs for each of my subjects look so different from one another? Like in the first image, there's hardly four heartbeat events for around 500 secs while in the second one there are a lot in that timeframe. Might this be an acquisition error? Attached below you will see another output i got from running the same script and it is also entirely different from the two. On a side note, does the y axis indicate heart rate x cardiac response function values? Thanks again!