Acquire and analyze synchronized video and waveform data

[Steve.J]

I had an opportunity recently to visit the Marine Biological Laboratory at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod.  National Instruments has supported the work at this prestigious lab over the years with equipment and software donations, so it was great to see our tools being used in cutting edge research.  The fun part about the summer program at Woods Hole is that researchers from around the world come to teach some of the newest techniques for making neurophysiological measurements.  One of the technical themes that I noticed from these visits is the increasing use of coordinated (ideally tightly synchronized) video and waveform data.  In some cases, the goal is to correlate the behavior of an organism to controlled stimulus in its environment, or with measurements of nerve or muscle activity within the organism itself.  In other cases, images of tissue or cells (perhaps using fluorescent dyes) are acquired while cells are excited chemically or electrically.  The variety is endless.  In one amazing example (technique taught by Michael Dickinson from CalTech) the images of the wings of a fruit fly are acquired while recording from the "brain" of the fly while it is presented with a variety of visual stimuli.

Since timing and synchronization have always been a hallmark of NI's data acquisition technology, this kind of tightly synchronized video and measurement task is very simple when using image acquisition boards (analog or digital Cameralink) since the image acquisition board can be setup to drive the sample clock of the DAQ board using RTSI.  There is no need to create triggers to start and stop video acquisition and hope that during post-acquisition analysis you can line up the two data streams - click here for example code.

Even better - with NI DIAdem you can easily move through hours of video and waveform data collected using LabVIEW and do it easily all in the same environment without any programming.  Check out this screenshot, which shows automobile vehicle data (like RPM, engine temperature, ignition timing parameters, etc.) as waveforms while cockpit video, audio, and even GPS coordinates are updated all simultaneously.  Imagine this applied to the tracking of a migrating bird while physiological and environmental parameters are logged.  Or the force of a grasshopper's leg is measured while high-speed video captures the "jump" and electrodes measure the nerves driving the legs.  Instead of the GPS mapping module, you could import a 3D model of the grasshopper's leg and map the stress in the leg as a color map on the model.

DIAdem is an incredibly useful tool for managing and visualizing technical data and I'm convinced that this tool could dramatically increase the productivity of researchers in many fields.