NIRS fNIRS Webinars before 2022:

NIRS fNIRS - Pergunta científica, Desenhos Experimentais NIRS fNIRS - Free NIRS fNIRS Event:

NIRx Past Webinars

3rd November - Group Level Analysis with Dr. Ted Huppert

Dr. Ted Huppert is an Associate Professor from the University of Pittsburgh with more than 65 peer-reviewed publications on brain imaging methodologies. He will be joining us to give a detailed look at Group Level Analysis with fNIRS and practical demonstration in the BrainAnalyzIR, his Matlab based analysis platform. This toolbox is one of the most used fNIRS analysis platforms and was developed by Dr. Huppert and his team. Watch the webinar here.

7th October - Satori, a look at the new fNIRS analysis software with Dr. Michael Lührs from Brain Innovation

We are very excited to announce the launch of our new easy-to-use, GUI-based analysis software made in collaboration with Brain Innovation. Brain Innovation have been our partners in the established real-time analysis software Turbo-Satori. The webinar will give you an overview of the main features of Satori, from standard fNIRS processing methods to statistical tools and data vizualization. Watch the webinar here.

24th August - Objective Measurements of Tinnitus using fNIRS with Dr. Mehrnaz Shoushtarian

For this webinar we were pleased to welcome Dr. Mehrnaz Shoushtarian of the Bionics Institute, Melbourne to talk about objective measurements of tinnitus. Chronic tinnitus, hearing sounds that are not present externally, affects around 1 in 8 individuals and can severely impact their quality of life. Rates of tinnitus increase with age and are expected to further rise in the future due to increasing noise exposure among young people.

Despite its wide prevalence, there is currently no objective way to determine the presence or severity of tinnitus or assess whether treatments are effective. Lack of an objective measure remains a significant hurdle to the development of treatments for this condition. They are working to develop an objective measure of tinnitus using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. This talk will present some of their work to date. Watch the webinar here.

30th June and 21st July - An introduction to fNIRS analysis using MNE with Dr. Robert Luke: Part 1 and 2

Dr. Robert Luke spoke in a 2 part series about fNIRS analysis using MNE. MNE is an open-source Python package for exploring, visualizing, and analyzing human neurophysiological data. The first webinar held 30th June 2021 included an introduction to MNE, the ecosystem of packages, installation, and an overview of basic analysis. You can watch it here. In the second webinar, Dr. Luke will dove deeper into fNIRS analysis with MNE including GLM and group-level analysis. You can watch part 2 here.

15th June- NIRx Journal Club: Best Practices in fNIRS with Dr. Meryem Yücel

For the first of the open webinars in Journal Club format, we were pleased to welcome Dr. Meryem Yücel to talk about the recently released paper on best practices in fNIRS. With the rapid growth and the diversification of research methods in fNIRS studies, some inconsistencies are appearing in the way in which methods are presented, which can make the interpretation and replication of studies unnecessarily challenging.

A representative group of leaders in the field of fNIRS (including Dr. Yücel) was assembled by the Society for Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy to build a consensus on the best practices for describing the methods utilized in fNIRS studies. Their "paper has been designed to provide guidelines to help enhance the reliability, repeatability, and traceability of reported fNIRS studies and encourage best practices throughout the community." Watch here.

11th May- Hyperscan: The hyperscanning feature for NIRSport2 + Aurora

Hosted by NIRx support staff Blanca Pérez-Sempere and Dr. Mahipal Choudhary

To efficiently collect fNIRS data from multiple subjects simultaneously with the NIRSport2 platform, NIRx is proud to offer Hyperscan, a standalone application that can control the functionality of multiple instances of Aurora from a single interface. The purpose of this webinar is to get users acquainted with the use of this application.

Hyperscan offers great flexibility in terms of recording connection, number of NIRSport2 devices and the optode count and montage layout for individual subjects. After the theoretical introduction to these features, we show an example experiment to give a demonstration of Hyperscan in action. This webinar was hosted by our expert support team. Watch the webinar here.

8th April - Optimal Probe Placement in fNIRS Research

Guest Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Rickson Mesquita

Reproducibility of results is one of the keystones in science and, in fact, is what makes science advanced over the centuries. The search for high reproducibility of the same experimental protocol across different sessions is particularly critical for longitudinal studies in functional neuroscience and in different clinical applications, so that one can unentangle the variability caused by systematic errors due to instrumentation/protocol from the intrinsic variability due to the research question. Specifically for fNIRS studies, we have found several contributors to systematic errors over the past ten years, such as motion artifacts, extra cortical contamination and global systemic physiology. More recently, we have found that the lack of spatial information of the optodes on the head can also introduce a major confounding source to the results and lead to misinterpretation of data. In this talk we will discuss the major problems that contributes to systematic errors in fNIRS, and present recent solutions we implemented to reduce variability in fNIRS protocols - including the integration of a real time neuronavigator system to guide probe placement of optodes in fNIRS. View the webinar here.

10th March - fNIRS In Epilepsy: From Research To Clinic

Guest Lecturers: Dr. Anne Gallagher, Phetsamone Vannasing, and Alejandra M. Hüsser

In this webinar, a team of three scientists of the LIONlab, Université de Montréal, Dr. Anne Gallagher, Phetsamone Vannasing and Alejandra Hüsser, will discuss the value of simultaneous fNIRS and EEG acquisition in patients with epilepsy. They will describe different applications of combined fNIRS-EEG evaluations in research as well as the integration of fNIRS-EEG into the pre-surgical assessment protocol of patients with severe epilepsy. The particularities, challenges and solutions for the installation and data acquisition of a multimodal fNIRS set-up in young patients will be discussed. We will conclude with a preview of potential pathways for multimodal data analysis using LIONirs toolbox. Watch the webinar here.

18th Feb - fNIRS in a different light: a webinar

Guest Lecturer: Dr. Felipe Orihuela-Espina

Part narrative, part mathematics, this webinar is about uniqueness of Dr. Orihuela-Espina’s research in fNIRS. He will review some of his research in fNIRS analysis and interpretation, with computational approaches unorthodox to the field. This will be in the context of three peculiarities; a computer science background, research in a developing country, and unconventional research interests. We shall visit the beauty of manifolds, explore different theories of causal analysis, and envision the automation of our research analysis pipelines by means of knowledge representation. Watch the webinar here.

19th Jan - Short channels analysis in the AnalyzIR toolbox

Guest Lecturer: Dr. Hendrik Santosa

In this webinar, Dr. Santosa will quantitatively compare the performance of several techniques in fNIRS analysis including spatial and temporal filtering, regression, component analysis, and the use of short-separation measurements as the part of the AnalyzIR toolbox. Dr. Santosa is a research instructor in the Department of Radiology at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interest includes statistical method, brain-computer interface, hyperscanning, advance brain signal processing, and multimodal neuroimaging techniques. Watch the webinar.

Cognitive load assessment in surgeons brain and skill acquisition in surgical training

Guest lecturers: Dr Daniel Richard Leff and Dr. Harsimrat Singh

Technical skills are a critical component of every surgeon. The early assessment of the learning curve of surgical skills can help assess the efficacy of training and adapt it to individual needs. How do we consistently assess the cognitive strain on surgeons during surgeries? Can strategies be developed to help trainees and surgeons cope with excessive cognitive load in the operating theatre?  These topics and much more were discussed in this webinar. Watch the webinar.

Q&A Session on LSL

Guest lecturers: Dr. David Medine

In August, Dr. Medine held a webinar on integrated NIRS-EEG, with particular focus on LSL integration. To give an opportunity to all users in North and South America to reach out to Dr. Medine for questions, we organized a second Q&A portion. Watch the webinar and access the presentation slides.

Mobile brain imaging with fNIRS

Guest lecturers: Dr. Alexander von Lühmann, Dr. Robert Franke

Dr. Alexander von Lühmann joins us for a webinar focussed on the challenges of mobile brain imaging and the application of fNIRS. Dr. Robert Franke gives an overview of NIRx' accelerometer specifications and the team performs a NIRSport2 32x32 live demo with 2 accelerometers. If you are interested in mobile brain imaging using fNIRS, this webinar is for you. Watch the webinar.

Infant & Child Imaging with fNIRS

Guest lecturers: Dr. Judit Gervain, Dr. Susan Perlman

Part I: Hemodynamic response in infants with Dr. Judit Gervain. Learn more about infant imaging with fNIRS. In this webinar, Dr. Gervain discusses advantages and possible limitations and also use cases and applications. Practical considerations of imaging infants are also discussed. Watch the webinar.

PartII: Infant & Child Imaging with fNIRS with Dr. Susan Perlman. The following key considerations were discussed: advantages and tradeoffs of using fNIRS for developmental research; specific use cases, such as looking at simultaneous parent-child measurements; and data collection tips. Watch the webinar and access the presentation slides.

Multi-Modal Integration: EEG & fNIRS

Guest Lecturers: Dr. David Medine, Dr. Ted Huppert, Dr. Alexander von Lühmann, Maria Adelia de Aratanha

Part I: Integrating EEG and fNIRS, how is it done? Joining our team of consultants are Dr. David Medine, Dr. Alexander von Lühmann and Maria Adelia de Aratanha to explore the integration of combined fNIRS-EEG. A portion of the webinar focussed on triggering, synchronization and LSL. Practical hints on how to setup the integrated cap for good signal quality were also discussed. Watch the webinar and access the presentation slides.

Part II: Approaches to analysis of fNIRS and EEG data. Dr. Ted Huppert (University of Pittsburgh) is a leader in multi-modal neuroimaging methods. He begins this talk with an in-depth discussion of cross validation of multi-modal methods. He then discusses physiological modelling of neural signals, and combined EEG-fNIRS analysis methods. He rounds out the talk with a practical demonstration in the NIRS Toolbox, his Matlab based analysis platform. Watch the webinar and access the presentation slides.

Turbo Satori Webinars I: Getting Started

Guest Lecturer: Dr. Michael Lührs

Part I: This webinar covered how to download, install and get familiar with Turbo-Satori, a comprehensive real-time fNIRS analysis and neurofeedback solution from our partners at Brain Innovation. Download the slides here and watch the webinar here.

Part II: Overview: This advanced webinar on Turbo-Satori was done in collaboration with our partner, Brain Innovation. Dr. Michael Lührs gave us a deeper look into the new Turbo-Satori release and showed some advanced analysis features. Download the slides here and watch the webinar here.

2nd Level fNIRS Analysis with Covariates (Examples in the Brain AnalyzIR/NIRS Toolbox)

Guest Lecturer: Dr. Jessica Gemignani

Overview: This webinar explored 2nd level analysis, focusing in particular on the use of covariates and how they can be tested for correlations with the signal change in contrasts across subjects. Tools: NIRS Toolbox / AnalyzIR. Watch the video here and download the slides here.

Motion Analysis in the Brain AnalyzIR/NIRS Toolbox

Guest Lecturer: Dr. Ted Huppert
Overview: Dr. Huppert reviewed fNIRS data analysis with short channels and an accelerometer within NIRS Toolbox, an fNIRS analysis program. Download the data set here. Watch the first part of the presentation about motion artifact correction here and the second part where Dr. Huppert gives a walkthrough of motion and artifact corrections in NIRS Toolbox here. Download the code from Dr. Huppert here. To find answers to questions that weren’t covered during the webinar, click here.

The New Homer3 and Motion Analysis

Guest Lecturer: Dr. Meryem Yücel
Overview: Dr. Yucel reviewed fNIRS analysis with short channels and an accelerometer within the Homer3 fNIRS analysis program. Download presentation slides and download the data set. Watch the first part of the presentation about motion artifact correction here and the second part about Homer3, demonstration of motion correction and a new artifact correction model with the GLM here. To find answers to questions that weren’t covered during the webinar, click here.

Introduction to NIRS Toolbox: Installation & Getting Started

Guest Lecturer: Dr. Ted Huppert
Overview: Covers installation and basic use of the NIRS Toolbox (Brain AnalyzIR), followed by a Q&A session with its creator, Dr. Huppert. Download presentation slides here, download data set here and watch the video here. To find answers to questions that weren’t covered during the webinar, click here.

Introduction to Homer3: Installation & Getting Started

Guest Lecturer: Dr. Ted Huppert
Overview: Description: Covers installation and basic use of the Homer3 fNIRS analysis software. Download presentation slides here, download data set here and watch the video here. To find answers to questions that weren’t covered during the webinar, click here.

Hyperscanning with the NIRSport2 and Aurora 1.4

Overview: This webinar shows how to use the NIRSport2 and Aurora platform to perform an acquisition on multiple participants at the same time. Watch the video here.

NIRS Montage Design

Overview: NIRx FOLD (fNIRS Optode-Location Decider) toolbox; NIRSite; NIRS cap preparation. Watch the video here.

fNIRS Experimental design

Overview: Designing your NIRS experiment, TTL pulse basics with NIRS, using Lab-Streaming Layer with NIRStar, etc. Watch the video here.


fNIRS Studies with Infants & Toddlers

Overview:  Dr. Afrouz Anderson and Dr. Jessica Gemignani share their expertise on infant studies. They discussed the impact of short distance channels in different ages, point out some montages and brain atlases that are frequently used for infants, among other considerations. The talk focused on children, aged prenatal through 4 years old. Watch the video here.

Overview of NIRStar 15-2

Overview: An introduction and online training of the new NIRStar 15-2 software. Watch the video here.

Overview of Aurora 1.4

Overview:  A walk through and basic training of Aurora, the NIRSport2 data acquisition software. Emphasis is placed on the new features with the Aurora 1.4 release, including a new block average view and improved Wi-Fi connection with an access point router. Watch the video here.

High Density Measurements - Multi-Device Mode with NIRSport2

Overview: This second webinar of the Aurora 1.4 series details the hardware and software considerations for cascading multiple NIRSport2 devices together. Watch the video here.


Using Short Channels with NIRx Platform

Overview: Creating montages in NIRSite, enabling short channel setup in NIRStar and cap setup. Watch the video here.



Psychopy Presentation Software with NIRx Systems

Overview: This webinar goes through using the PsychoPy Presentation software (a free python-based program: http://www.psychopy.org/) with NIRx NIRS recording systems and software. Watch the video here.


fNIRS Analysis Options For Data Including Short Channels

Overview: This short webinar covers the basics of short channel analysis in Homer2 NIRS analysis software. Watch the video here.

Introduction to The NIRS Brain AnalyzIR Toolbox - a Possible Processing Workflow

Overview: This webinar gives a brief introduction of the NIRS Brain AnalyzIR Toolbox and presents a possible pipeline for the complete analysis of fNIRS data. Watch the video here.

Introduction to Turbo Satori, a real-time Analysis Program for fNIRS data

Overview: This webinar gives a an overview of Turbo Satori, the main features and benefits and integration with NIRx instruments and software. Watch the video here.

NIRSite 2.0

Overview: This webinar covers all new features of the recently released NIRSite 2.0 Software. Watch the video here.

Learn More

Co-Registering fNIRS/MRI in NIRS Toolbox

Guest Lecturer: Dr. Ted Huppert

Overview: Importing of anatomical (MRI) information , probe registration to anatomical landmarks (including head size variations),  optical forward model simulations, image reconstruction basics, and anatomically defined region-of-interest methods. Watch the video here.

Studying functional connectivity with fNIRS

Overview: A review of the concepts of functional connectivity analysis in fNIRS, plus a simple demonstration of how to a connectivity analysis in the Brain AnalyzIR Toolbox. Watch the video here.

Overview of Aurora fNIRS

Overview: An introduction and online training of the new Aurora fNIRS software for the NIRSport 2. Watch the video here.

fNIRS Based Brain Computer Interfaces

Guest Lecturer: Dr. Noman Naseer

Overview: Practical and analysis considerations for using fNIRS based Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) by BCI expert, Dr. Noman Naseer. Watch the video here.