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Decoding the Human Brain 🧠✨

Welcome to the official repository for the BrainHack Vanderbilt 2026 project!

This project explores how the human prefrontal cortex dynamically encodes and maintains environmental architecture during spatial and feature-based working memory tasks using human intracranial stereo-EEG (sEEG) recordings.

📂 The Data & Sharing Permissions

Data-Use and Sharing Policy

The intracranial sEEG recordings provided for this hackathon contain de-identified human electrophysiological research data.

  • Permitted Use: These data are provided exclusively for academic, educational, and benchmarking purposes within the scope of BrainHack Vanderbilt 2026.
  • Redistribution: Do not redistribute, publicly host, or share these download links outside of the event without prior consent from the lab.

Because raw data files are large (~2 GB each), they are not tracked in GitHub.

📋 Data Format & Schema

The data are stored in .mat files containing a single variable SEEG, which is a 1 × N struct array where N is the number of channels pooled across subjects.

Each channel struct includes:

  • Sub: Subject identifier (e.g., 'sub-01')
  • Task: Task type ('Delay3s' or 'MNM')
  • Condition: Experimental condition metadata
  • Channel: Numeric channel ID
  • Channel_Label: Clinical label of the electrode contact
  • subRegion: Specific anatomical subregion
  • Prefrontal_subdiv: Prefrontal subdivision ('Dorsal', 'Ventral') used for primary comparative analysis
  • Hemisphere: Hemisphere of the implant ('L' or 'R')
  • CorrectTrials / Correct: Struct array containing successfully completed trials with fields:
    • Class: Stimulus class label (1–9 or '1–8')
    • TrialData: Raw time-series voltage data
    • Common: Common-average reference (CAR) filtered time-series data
    • Laplacian: Local Laplacian-filtered time-series data

🔬 Signal Referencing Schemes

  • Raw sEEG LFP (TrialData): Unreferenced contact voltage $V_i(t)$.

  • Common-Average Reference (Common): Subtracts the mean signal across all selected shaft contacts:

$$V^{\text{CAR}}_i(t) = V_i(t) - \frac{1}{N} \sum_{j=1}^{N} V_j(t)$$

Reduces global/shared noise across the array; may attenuate broadly distributed activity.

  • Laplacian Reference (Laplacian): Subtracts the average of the two immediately adjacent contacts along the same shaft:

$$V^{\text{LAP}}_i(t) = V_i(t) - \frac{V_{i-1}(t) + V_{i+1}(t)}{2}$$

Suppresses volume-conducted signals and isolates spatially focal neural activity.

Research Opportunity: Attendees are encouraged to benchmark decoding accuracy across raw (TrialData), Common, and Laplacian signals to evaluate how spatial filtering impacts classification performance.

🚀 BrainHack Milestones

🟢 Milestone 1: Data Cleaning & Visualization (Low Complexity)

  • Goal: Parse .mat files, evaluate trial balances across classes, and remove noisy/sparse channels.
  • Deliverable: Run and extend scripts/visualization.m to plot raw vs. CAR vs. Laplacian traces and power spectral densities (PSD).

🟡 Milestone 2: Feature Engineering (Medium Complexity)

  • Goal: Extract time-frequency features (e.g., 70–150 Hz high-gamma power, multi-band power spectral densities, wavelets) to improve signal representation.
  • Deliverable: Create feature extraction pipelines in scripts/feature_extraction.m.

🔴 Milestone 3: Time-Resolved Low-Sample Decoding (High Complexity)

  • Goal: Build classifiers (e.g., Support Vector Machines with RBF kernels, regularized LDA) capable of decoding task variables with small per-class sample sizes (~3 trials/class).
  • Deliverable: Compare temporal decoding trajectories between Dorsal and Ventral prefrontal subdivisions in scripts/decode_subregions.m.

📖 Scientific Background & Baseline Logic

Before diving into code, please read our comprehensive decoding draft document: 👉 Read the Decoding Logic & Existing Results Guide

This document details the logic behind our current high-gamma SVM approach and shows our existing Non-Human Primate (NHP) and human decoding results.

🛠️ Getting Started & Prerequisites

1. MATLAB Installation & Licensing

This project requires MATLAB (R2022b or later recommended) with the Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox and Signal Processing Toolbox.

2. Repository Setup

git clone [https://github.com/oDtsou/human-decoding-hackathon.git](https://github.com/oDtsou/human-decoding-hackathon.git)
cd human-decoding-hackathon

Then, open MATLAB, navigate to the cloned directory, and run the following in the MATLAB Command Window:

% Add all subfolders to the MATLAB search path
addpath(genpath(pwd));
savepath;