The Lab Streaming Layer for Synchronized Multimodal Recording

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Abstract

Accurately recording the interactions of humans or other organisms with their environment or other agents requires synchronized data access via multiple instruments, often running independently using different clocks. Active, hardware-mediated solutions are often infeasible or prohibitively costly to build and run across arbitrary collections of input systems. The Lab Streaming Layer (LSL) offers a software-based approach to synchronizing data streams based on per-sample time stamps and time synchronization across a common LAN. Built from the ground up for neurophysiological applications and designed for reliability, LSL offers zero-configuration functionality and accounts for network delays and jitters, making connection recovery, offset correction, and jitter compensation possible. These features ensure precise, continuous data recording, even in the face of interruptions. The LSL ecosystem has grown to support over 150 data acquisition device classes as of Feb 2024, and establishes interoperability with and among client software written in several programming languages, including C/C++, Python, MATLAB, Java, C#, JavaScript, Rust, and Julia. The resilience and versatility of LSL have made it a major data synchronization platform for multimodal human neurobehavioral recording and it is now supported by a wide range of software packages, including major stimulus presentation tools, real-time analysis packages, and brain-computer interfaces. Outside of basic science, research, and development, LSL has been used as a resilient and transparent backend in scenarios ranging from art installations to stage performances, interactive experiences, and commercial deployments. In neurobehavioral studies and other neuroscience applications, LSL facilitates the complex task of capturing organismal dynamics and environmental changes using multiple data streams at a common timebase while capturing time details for every data frame.

The overall LSL design for synchronized data recording

Citation

@ARTICLE{Kothe2024-zm,
  title    = "The Lab Streaming Layer for Synchronized Multimodal Recording",
  author   = "Kothe, Christian and Shirazi, Seyed Yahya and Stenner, Tristan and
              Medine, David and Boulay, Chadwick and Crivich, Matthew I and
              Mullen, Tim and Delorme, Arnaud and Makeig, Scott",
  journal  = "bioRxiv",
  pages    = "2024.02.13.580071",
  month    =  feb,
  year     =  2024,
  language = "en"
}