NIRS-ICA: A MATLAB Toolbox for Independent Component Analysis Applied in fNIRS Studies

Yang Zhao; Pei-Pei Sun; Fu-Lun Tan; Xin Hou; Chao-Zhe Zhu

doi:10.3389/fninf.2021.683735

NIRS-ICA: A MATLAB Toolbox for Independent Component Analysis Applied in fNIRS Studies

Front Neuroinform. 2021 Jul 14:15:683735. doi: 10.3389/fninf.2021.683735. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Yang Zhao¹, Pei-Pei Sun¹, Fu-Lun Tan¹, Xin Hou¹, Chao-Zhe Zhu^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
² IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.

Abstract

Independent component analysis (ICA) is a multivariate approach that has been widely used in analyzing brain imaging data. In the field of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), its promising effectiveness has been shown in both removing noise and extracting neuronal activity-related sources. The application of ICA remains challenging due to its complexity in usage, and an easy-to-use toolbox dedicated to ICA processing is still lacking in the fNIRS community. In this study, we propose NIRS-ICA, an open-source MATLAB toolbox to ease the difficulty of ICA application for fNIRS studies. NIRS-ICA incorporates commonly used ICA algorithms for source separation, user-friendly GUI, and quantitative evaluation metrics assisting source selection, which facilitate both removing noise and extracting neuronal activity-related sources. The options used in the processing can also be reported easily, which promotes using ICA in a more reproducible way. The proposed toolbox is validated and demonstrated based on both simulative and real fNIRS datasets. We expect the release of the toolbox will extent the application for ICA in the fNIRS community.

Keywords: MATLAB toolbox; blind source separation; data processing; functional near-infrared spectroscopy; independent component analysis; multivariate analysis; software.