Handy programs to visualize NIRS data (6): plotAverage

55 sec read

This is the 6th post of the series: Handy programs to visualize NIRS data

When we do an experiment, we often repeat an event (or block) for a few times. For example, in a typical finger tapping task, we ask the participants to do a finger tapping for 20s, then rest for 20s, then repeat the whole tap-rest paradigm for 10 time.

After we extract the NIRS time courses, we often need to know the average of the signal over all repetitions of the event. In the finger tapping experiment, we want to know the average signal across 10 blocks of finger tapping.

What we need to do is:

  1. Know the timing of each block (of course!)
  2. cut the NIRS signal into pieces. The starting points should be a few seconds before the onset timing of the experiment block; and the ending points should be a few seconds after the offset of the experiment block.
  3. Align the pieces and average
  4. Also calculate the standard deviation (or error) of the average
  5. plot
The attached cuixuNIRSretrieve.m and plotAverage can automatically do the above steps. Below is a plot done by plotAverage. In this example, there are two types of events, fs and fb. Each was repeated 10 times. The plot below plot the average of each of the event, and also the standard deviation (the shaded area). The vertical grey bar is the onset timing of the events. From the plot we can see that fb elicits a bigger response than fs does.
plotAverage
plotAverage
You can download the two scripts at:



写作助手,把中式英语变成专业英文


Want to receive new post notification? 有新文章通知我

第六十七期fNIRS Journal Club通知2025/11/1, 10am 肖雅琼教授团队

近年来,越来越多的研究关注自闭症谱系障碍 (ASD)儿童的大脑功能连接异常。但这些异常连接在时间维度上如何变化?又是否与儿童的症状严重程度和认知能力有关?深圳理工大学的肖雅琼教授使用功能性近红外光谱
Wanling Zhu
13 sec read

第六十六期fNIRS Journal Club视频 李洪博士 牛海晶教授

Youtube: https://youtu.be/gkXdJkOalNY 优酷:https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNjUwMzg3MzQ2MA==.html 随着老龄化加
Wanling Zhu
13 sec read

fNIRS Frontier Weekly Report (free service)

Subscription Link: https://www.storkapp.me/readingguide/ If you are interested in the fNIRS (Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy) field, Stork is now offering a free service: every week, we will collect and summarize the fNIRS-related literature pu
Xu Cui
3 min read

5 Replies to “Handy programs to visualize NIRS data (6): plotAverage”

  1. Hi Cui,

    Thanks for your generous contribution, I am just wondering if the normal hyspectral camera can take pictures inside potatos
    Any external light can penetrate the potato body(tub)?

    Thanks lot , if you can provide some confirmation.

    regards,
    Dom

  2. Hi Xu

    We would like to use your scripts to average and plot NIRS data.

    Do you may have sample data to test it? I am especially not sure how the eventOnset (structure, the onset time (in seconds) of event) should look like.

    many thanks in advance
    lisa

  3. @Xu Cui
    Hi Xu, I can’t open the link above. Can you send the example of data again?
    I am in doubt whether the data is the output of NirsLAB block average since the signal event specifies a column vector, but I have been exporting Oxy and Deoxy which results a text document with two columns. Additionally, the time onset differs from participant from another as my finger tapping blocks were randomized, should I create eventOnset for each participant?

    kind regards,
    Artur

Leave a Reply to Dom Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *