Neural Noise

fNIRS community effort on accessibility and resources (Meryem Yücel, Boston University)

2 min read

  • Meryem Yücel leads a group of fNIRS experts to advance field accessibility and resources (Boston University).1
  • Supports adoption of fNIRS for research and potential BCI/neurofeedback; institutional, tier-2.1 1

Weekly enrichment (2026-07-20)

  • The source is a Boston University Neurophotonics Center feature (28 Oct 2025) profiling Research Associate Professor Meryem A. Yücel (Biomedical Engineering), Technical Director of the Neurophotonics Center, and her large-scale collaborative projects that build introductory-to-advanced fNIRS resources.2
  • Yücel chairs the Society for functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (SfNIRS) Standardization and Open Science Committee (chair since 2022), whose mission is to establish and disseminate best practices, standards, and open-science principles for rigor, reproducibility, and interoperability in fNIRS.3
  • The committee promotes community-driven frameworks — SNIRF (Shared Near-Infrared File Format) and BIDS-fNIRS — plus the FRESH Reproducibility Study Hub, and collaborates with international standards bodies (ISO/IEC) on formal fNIRS instrumentation and cerebral-oximetry standards.3
  • SNIRF is an open, HDF5-based format (.snirf extension) covering CW/TD/FD NIRS, DCS, fluorescence, and bioluminescence; version 1.0 was released in September 2021 after roughly two years in draft, with readers/writers across C, C++, MATLAB, and Python and a steering committee that includes David Boas (Boston University).4 5
  • On inclusivity, Yücel is corresponding author (h-index 29) on a Nature Human Behaviour (2025) study quantifying how hair and skin characteristics affect fNIRS signal quality; preliminary results show a significant correlation between hair properties and measurement signal-to-noise ratio.6
  • Her MindLights Lab runs the fNIRS Glossary Project, a community-sourced, consensus-based nomenclature, and the FRESH Project, which quantifies how independent researchers analyzing the same dataset can reach differing conclusions.7
  • For analysis tooling, Homer3 (an open-source MATLAB application succeeding Homer2, developed 2009–2019) implements SNIRF, adds subject- and group-level custom processing scripts, and ships alongside AtlasViewer with a community forum and training webinars.8
  • The committee also emphasizes education, outreach, and accessibility so open science benefits early-career researchers through clinical practitioners across all regions and resource levels.3

Footnotes

  1. https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMijwFBVV95cUxPU2dRMW43WHhVNzhwbVVSdGxIV2pWQ0JPa2oxLU5CQVJMdWhUQWJmNlhGNl80c0FNZ2xPaHRiTDJ3c19yal9lNko1MmVvOC0zNERLOXA1NWZBWXhMMlAyWE92ZFlXSHJtZkEwTFNGVGNHOFI4WUgweWk5c1ZZY1l2eEdBZFlMNVY5OVBYWXAxcw?oc=5 ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. https://www.bu.edu/neurophotonics/2025/10/28/mapping-out-brain-studies-beyond-the-lab/ ↩

  3. https://fnirs.org/about-us/committees/standardization-committee/ ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. https://fnirs.org/resources/data-analysis/standards/ ↩

  5. https://github.com/fNIRS/snirf/ ↩

  6. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02274-7 ↩

  7. https://sites.bu.edu/mayucel/research/ ↩

  8. https://openfnirs.org/software/homer/ ↩

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