Background: Although cardio-respiratory (CR) system is generally controlled by the autonomic nervous system, interactions between the cortex and these primary functions are receiving an increasing research interest . New method: In general, the timing of such internally paced events (e.g. heartbeats or respiratory cycles) may display a large variability. For the analysis of such CR event-related EEG potentials, a baseline must be correctly associated to each cycle of detected events. The open-source toolbox CARE-rCortex provides an easy-to-use interface to detect CR events, define baselines, and analyse in time-frequency (TF) domain the  EEG potentials. Results: CARE-rCortex provides some practical tools for the detection and the manual validation of CR events. These events allow to define baselines time-locked to a phase of respiratory or heart cycles . A statistical test has also been integrated to highlight significant points of the TF maps with respect to the baseline. We illustrate the use of the toolbox with the analysis of two real cardio-respiratory datasets. Comparison with existing methods: Compared to other open-source toolboxes, CARE-rCortex allows  to automatically detect CR events, to define and check baselines for each detected event. Different baseline normalizations can be used in the TF analysis of EEG epochs. Conclusions: The analysis of CR-related EEG activities could provide valuable information about cognitive or pathological brain states . CARE-rCortex provides an efficient and automatic detection of CR events for a posterior analysis of event-related EEG activities . CARE-rCortex runs in Matlab as a plug-in of the EEGLAB software, and it is publicly available at URL
Background: Although cardio-respiratory (CR) system is generally controlled by the autonomic nervous system, interactions between the cortex and these primary functions are receiving an increasing interest in neurosciences . New method: In general, the timing of such internally paced events (e.g. heartbeats or respiratory cycles) may display a large variability. For the analysis of such CR event-related EEG potentials, a baseline must be correctly associated to each cycle of detected events. The open-source toolbox CARE-rCortex provides an easy-to-use interface to detect CR events, define baselines, and analyse in time-frequency (TF) domain the CR-based EEG potentials. Results: CARE-rCortex provides some practical tools to detect and validate these CR events. Users can define baselines time-locked to a phase of respiratory or heart cycle . A statistical test has also been integrated to highlight significant points of the TF maps with respect to the baseline. We illustrate the use of CARE-rCortex with the analysis of two real cardio-respiratory datasets. Comparison with existing methods: Compared to other open-source toolboxes, CARE-rCortex allows users to automatically detect CR events, to define and check baselines for each detected event. Different baseline normalizations can be used in the TF analysis of EEG epochs. Conclusions: The analysis of CR-related EEG activities could provide valuable information about cognitive or pathological brain states . CARE-rCortex runs in Matlab as a plug-in of the EEGLAB software, and it is publicly available at URL
R
research interest
interest in neurosciences
A
CR-based
R
for the detection and the manual validation of
to detect and validate these
R
These events allow to
Users can
R
cycles
cycle
R
the toolbox
CARE-rCortex
A
users
D
. CARE-rCortex provides an efficient and automatic detection of CR events for a posterior analysis of event-related EEG activities