Why not support leak currents?

[LeMuellerGuy]

Hi everyone,

first of all I want to thank you for the easy to use package. The one thing that I (from the view of my current project) don't understand, is the lack of support for leak currents. As far as I understand the HEKA Patchmaster manual, the data is stored leak substracted anyway so it should at least be possible to retrieve them from the file. I modified the code to be able to do that but I assume that there is a good reason as to why that is not ideal. Is it because of previous file versions?

[easy-electrophysiology]

Hi @LeMuellerGuy, that's great to hear you are finding the package useful.

There isn't a strong reason why leak currents are not supported by default, past the fact it slightly complicated testing during the initial development. In general the strategy was to limit the scope of the package at the start and gradually expand it's scope when the need arose, to allow testing across all of the versions to proceed manageably. As such this would be a good time to add support for leak currents! Would you be interested in opening a PR with what you have so far or alternatively pasting some code snippets here? Thanks!

[easy-electrophysiology]

Hey @LeMuellerGuy, coincidentally another user also had the same question and some changes have been made to support leak files; it is working now for their test file. This add supports for leak channels and slightly reorganises the syntax for get_series_data(). Whereas previously the first argumnet was "Im" or "Vm", now the data retrieval is strictly based on channel index. So a call would be like:

get_series_data(self, group_idx, series_idx, channel_idx

It would be great if you could pull the post recent version of main and check it works on your data, cheers!

[easy-electrophysiology]

Hi @LeMuellerGuy do you think you will get a chance to test this?