Recently I started to learn how to use Hitachi ETG-4000 functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) for my research. Very quickly I found out that, as usual in neuroscience, the main data analysis packages are written in MATLAB.

I couldn’t find any script to analyse fNIRS data in R so I decided to write it myself. Apparently there are some Python options, like MNE or NinPy so I will look into them in future.

ETG-4000 records data in a straightforward(ish) .csv files but the most popular MATLAB package for fNIRS data analysis (HOMER2) expects .nirs files.

There is a ready-made MATLAB script that transforms Hitachi data into the nirs format but it’s only available in MATLAB. I will skip the transformation step for now, and will work only with a .nirs file.

The file I used (Simple_Probe.nirs) comes from the HOMER2 package. It is freely available in the package, but I uploaded it here to make the analysis easier to reproduce.

My code is here:

This will produce separate time series plots for each channel with overlapping triggers, e.g.:

The entire analysis workflow:

Other files:
- RMarkdown file
- html report

I hope this helps.
More to follow.