 |
LabOS - A Biomedical Experiment Control System
|
Design Aims
Biomedical research, human performance and other laboratories that work with living subjects and perform complex experiments unanticipated by software "solution" providers, must expend significant resources creating & maintaining data acquisition and control (DAQ&C) systems that are seldom useful in other labs because of their complexity or poor documentation, and quickly become obsolete because of design limitations and hardware dependencies.
|
We have a working prototype of a DAQ&C system, called "LabOS" that [1] is usable at "Operator", "Experimenter" and "Programmer" levels, and provides [2] deterministic ("hard") closed-loop control at kilohertz rates, [3] high speed buffered sampling (eg, for spike profiling), [4] multi-thread, state machine based, data-contingent, experimental protocols, and [5] a modern, richly informative, realtime graphical interface for viewing & controlling ongoing experiments, [6] on multiple platforms, with no dependence on unusual or single-source hardware. We now propose to [1] segment & harden the system so that user modifiable parts are easily & safely reconfigured, and other parts are invisible, [2] generalize certain aspects of LabOS to support its widest possible use, [3] provide data export tools, [4] optimize platform independence [5] produce contextual, reference and tutorial documentation, [6] support a web-based component library, and [7] conduct a beta test program to evaluate the experiences and suggestions of initial users, in an extended development cycle.
|
Methods
LabOS is written in "G" under LabVIEW-RT. The LabOS Console runs under Mac OS X, Windows or Linux.
|
The LabOS Server & Controller run under Ardence PharLap ETS on any National Instruments real-time hardware target, including PXI chassis, PCI boards, and some desktop PCs.
|
See Also
|
|
Miller JM (2006). LabOS: Closed-loop, Protocol-driven Data Acquisition & Control for Biomedical Experiments.
|
Project Status
|
STTR Grant 1 R41 EB006219-01 to JM Miller (PI) at Eidactics, funded by DHHS/NIH/NIBIB, 2006.07.03 - 2008.06.30, yielded a working prototype system. Testing and further development was interrupted by the chaos of Smith-Kettlewell's collapse.
|
|
