Analysis Plugins

This category of plugins attempts to provide a more generic means of including additional functionality within FIND. Currently, analysis plugins can fill two roles: Provide some visual analysis results when a user clicks on the analysis plugin from within the plugins menu, or return numeric analysis results to a piece of code calling it from within FIND. Analysis plugins must at least provide numeric results to callers, but the plugin can also indicate that it has the ability to display some results to the user through a dialog or other window object. This is possible through the method registration function which should be similar to the following:

def analysisMethod_register():
   return (analysisMethod, True)

Here, the first item in the tuple is a reference to the provided analysis method, while the second item is a boolean indicating (True in this case) that this method is callable by the user and will display some results visually. A True in this slot will cause FIND to create an enabled menu item in the Plugins>>Analysis menu. A False will cause FIND to place a disabled menu item to simply inform the user the plugin was loaded.

The analysis method signature and doc string are as follows:

def analysisMethod(data, **kwargs):
   """
   string-ID; method-name; Method description string
   """
   ...
   ...
   return (result, message)

The data parameter is an m x n array (numpy ndarray) with m data points (events), and n dimensions (channels). The **kwargs parameter is a dictionary containing options for the analysis algorithm. These could be either generic options provided by FIND or specific options you specify and publish for others to use. Currently FIND provides one option in the args dictionary: 'parentWindow'. This provides a reference to the FIND main window, and allows the analysis method to show a dialog or other window class for the purpose of displaying results to the user.

The first line of the doc string must be semicolon-separated into three fields as seen above. The ‘string-ID’ field is what other plugin authors will give to the analysis module in order to access the analysis method from within their own code. The ‘method-name’ is a short name that FIND will use for the menu item placed in Plugins>>Analysis. The final field will appear in the program status bar when a user moves the mouse over the menu item for the analysis plugin.

The return of the analysis method consists of a 2-tuple. The first element of the tuple is some result (or None) if it is being called from code and not by user interaction with the Plugin menu. The second element is a string message that will be displayed to the user in the program status bar once the method has completed running.

Plugin authors will be able to make use of analysis plugin methods by passing the string identifier in the following manner to the Analysis module:

import analysis.methods as am
result = am.getMethod('pca')(data)