We would like to use psychopy to present stimuli and acquire data from an ultrasound machine (the Telemed EchoB 128) for analysis of the articulation of the tongue during speech. The ultrasound machine requires drivers and data are acquired from a proprietary software, which is unfortunately quite unstable.
Would it be possible in principle to acquire data from the machine using psychopy, and, if so, has anyone managed to make it work?
Hi, since this is a proprietary system without any remote-control protocol (as far as I can tell from skimming over their website for a couple minutes), I’m afraid you’re out of luck.
It looks like the software can have some very basic control from the command line, detailed in the manual on page 176 here:
Apart from sending information about the session and type of scanning, the most relevant commands are simply to stop and start recordings. It’s possible that this could be done using PsychoPy to issue the needed shell commands, but that’s a Windows-specific thing I can’t help with. And not sure if that is the sort of degree of control you are after, and what kind of latency would be encountered.
As Richard suggests, it doesn’t look like this sort of system is really optimal for scientific (as opposed to clinical) use, but it depends on your needs I guess.
Thanks both. It really seems there is not much to do. The commands seem to start and stop the probe sending the signal more than recording (actually, we don’t use the original software for acquisition, but Articulate Assistant Advanced).