Week 2 - Charlie Heinke

This week, I saw that my task of quantifying the error in Dr. Marei's transcranial magnetic stimulation would be more difficult than I first thought. While the concept of taking the coordinates from the neuronaviagion system and measuring how much they deviate was simple in concept, I found that these coordinates were in a format with which I was not familiar: .xml files. These files were not well-labeled, and I couldn't simply extract the data in MATLAB, as I'm used to with .csv or .xls. I could get the coordinates using Excel, but it would be very difficult to automate the extraction and calculation using Excel macros. Believe me, I tried.

I needed to extract these coordinate data in a way that could be repeated after I left. That rules out MATLAB, which requires a subscription fee. So, I went with an opensource language that I've been meaning to learn for years... Python!

Python is a popular, high-level coding language that just so happenes to be excellent for parsing .xml files. So, this week I got to work on my program. It's almost finished! I might work on it a bit on Sunday so that I can impress Dr. Marei with it when he gets back from his vacation on Monday.

Someone in Dr. Lange's group even was kind enough to lend me a brand-new computer to work on! Too bad I can't log on to it because I don't have an HSS ID yet 😅. Now it just sits on my desk, taking up space and taunting me. A travesty.

You'll be mine eventually...