Physprep: Physiological Data Preparation Workflow Adapted for MR Settings
About
Peripheral biosignals are valuable for capturing fluctuations in cognitive and affective states, making it possible to characterize brain-body interactions in neuroimaging setup. The relevance of these measures when acquiring neuroimaging data and the subsequent increase in the amount of data processing highlight the importance of establishing reliable processing and reporting practices for biosignals acquired in magnetic resonance (MR) context, but a standardized head-to-tail workflow has yet to be proposed. Physprep is an open-source tool to prepare biosignals for analysis. This workflow presents itself as user-friendly and flexible by providing customization options through configuration files. The (pre-)processing of cardiac signals (ECG and PPG), electrodermal signals (EDA), and respiratory signals is currently supported.
Physprep was originally developed to preprocess physiological data acquired concurrently with large-scale individual functional MRI as part of the CNeuromMod project. This workflow combines well-maintained, community-based Python libraries such as Phys2bids and NeuroKit2, and relies on the BIDS standard.