It is advised that you book a pilot scan.  A pilot scan is a practice scan that is supervised by the SLO for your project. The PI for the project should be present at the pilot scan. A pilot scan gives you the opportunity to check that your experiment will run smoothly and make any final changes that will improve your experimental paradigm. You may or may not want to use a participant. You may or may not include the data from the pilot scan in your final analyses. The pilot scan will give you a chance to check the timing of your experiment. This is important because you need to book the appropriate amount of time on the scanners for your experiment.

One/both of these forms need to be filled in before/during the pilot scan:

By the end of the supervised pilot acquisition, you need to have completed two copies of either the MEG Experimental Setup form, or the MRI Experimental Setup form (as appropriate). One form needs to be kept by one member of the project, the other will be kept in MEG / MRI.

You will notice that on these Experimental Setup forms there is a list of 'Approved Persons'. Anyone who is going to be running the experiment needs to have attended at least one 'supervised scan'. The supervised scan can either be a pilot scan where the SLO is present, or a scan that is attended by the approved Principal Investigator. This supervised scan is necessary to ensure that each approved person knows how to run their experimental stimuli. It also helps to ensure that any operator has the necessary information to perform the scan for any project, and that the operator knows the person who is running the experiment has received the appropriate training.

You should be aware that the YNiC operators (both MEG and MRI) are not responsible for the running of your stimulus program(s). The running of the experiment is the responsibility of the investigator(s) present.  By the end of your pilot scan a final copy of your stimuli should be saved onto a USB stick (or equivalent) and in your group project folder. You need to be able to load this onto the stimulus computer and run the script yourself for each acquisition. It is your responsibility, not the operators, to run stimulus presentation scripts. Please be advised not to expect stimulus presentation scripts left on the stimulus delivery computers to be in the same state as you left them; either the stimuli may have been unintentionally modified by another User, or the computer itself may have been re-imaged.

To aid all Investigators, we have a checklist of advised practices. These following points should hopefully provide all the information for a trouble free imaging experience. By following these suggested practices, we feel that any Approved Person on any project would be capable of running an experiment with any operator.