Cuspis: A MATLAB Suite for Tasks Investigating Heart-Brain Interactions during fMRI

Valerio Villani; Manos Tsakiris

doi:10.5334/jors.476

Cuspis: A MATLAB Suite for Tasks Investigating Heart-Brain Interactions during fMRI

Journal of Open Research Software

Volume 11 (2023): Issue 1

By: Valerio Villani and Manos Tsakiris

Open Access

|Dec 2023

Abstract

Cuspis (Latin: [kuspis], meaning “sharp point”) is a MATLAB suite for presenting visual stimuli at different phases of the cardiac cycle and is designed to work with an MRI-compatible setup. Cuspis currently reads the electrocardiogram, detects the R-wave according to a user-defined threshold, and displays a visual stimulus with a specific stimulus onset asynchrony. To achieve this, Cuspis works in concert with the BIOPAC Hardware API [1] and Psychtoolbox [2, 3]. The software was developed for tasks investigating heart-brain interactions during functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, but, in principle, it can be used with different imaging techniques (e.g., electroencephalography), in behavioural research, as well as to trigger stimuli contingent on other bodily rhythms (e.g., respiratory cycle).

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