Mithra: An Open-Source and Cross-Platform Visualization Toolbox for Human Intracranial Recordings

Abstract

Intracranial electrophysiological recordings, including electrocorticography (ECoG) and stereo-EEG (sEEG), are increasingly used across research programs to study human brain function due to their high spatiotemporal resolution. Numerous tools exist for electrode localization and visualization; however, most focus on subject-level visualization and provide only partial solutions for systematic within- and across-subject analyses. It is especially important to preserve subject-specific anatomical locations while mapping electrodes to standardized spaces for analysis across multiple subjects. To address these needs, we present Mithra1: a toolkit for visualizing intracranial recordings, implemented in both Python and MATLAB. The toolbox enables visualization of electrodes alongside the brains pial surface and anatomical annotations, supports localization in common average spaces such as the MNI and FreeSurfer average brains, and maintains alignment with individual anatomy. It further allows electrode projection onto the cortical surface to generate Gaussian heatmaps representing the spatial distribution of neural activity. By integrating these capabilities into a unified framework, our toolbox provides a flexible, cross-platform solution for systematic within- and across-subject electrode visualization and analysis.