Imaging in Neuroscience: with a Focus on Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS)
The course is designed to provide students and researchers with a solid understanding of functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) as a relatively new tool to measure brain activity and will emphasize both theoretical knowledge and practical skills of fNIRS. The students will gain expertise in the underlying principles of fNIRS, its instrumentation, and various analytical approaches. The primary goal is to empower students with the knowledge of this additional neuroimaging tool to design and execute advanced experiments, interpret fNIRS data effectively, and contribute to cutting-edge research in neuroscience and related fields.
Upon completion of the fNIRS course, students should be able to:
Knowledge and understanding:
- Explain the principles of fNIRS and its applications in neuroscience or related fields
- Describe the preprocessing steps to remove noise in fNIRS signals
Competence and skills
- Perform an fNIRS experiment
- Conduct fundamental fNIRS processing/analysis using different methods
Judgement and approach
- Interpret fNIRS data with regard to brain structure and function
- Design fNIRS experiments and discuss how fNIRS can be integrated with other lab-based systems (i.e., mobility systems)
Educational background or research experience in relevant fields such as neurosciences, psychology, medicine, biomedicine, medical physics, medical imaging, computational biology, or any humanistic discipline employing neuroimaging as an experimental tool. Although not a prerequisite, it is an advantage to have a basic understanding of different statistical methods and programming skills in MATLAB, Python and R.