Building and Interpreting Broadband NIRS: A Practical Workshop on Physiology, Hardware, and Biomarker Extraction
Instructors: Luca Giannoni, Maheen Siddiqui, Ilias Tachtsidis
About this course
This workshop introduces broadband near-infrared spectroscopy (bNIRS), an advanced extension of fNIRS that captures hundreds of wavelengths to extract richer physiological information, including the oxidation state of cytochrome c oxidase (oxCCO). As a marker of mitochondrial oxidative function, oxCCO provides insight into cerebral metabolism beyond standard haemodynamics. Aimed at users with basic fNIRS experience, the course highlights recent advances enabling metabolic neuroimaging.
The workshop is structured around three objectives:
(1) Physiological understanding – covering CCO dynamics, neurovascular and neurometabolic coupling, and oxCCO responses to hypoxia, hyperoxia, and functional activation.
(2) System construction – outlining key hardware (broadband sources, spectrometers, optodes) and practical software workflows for building a simple bNIRS system.
(3) Data analysis – introducing multi-wavelength spectral fitting and extraction of metabolic biomarkers.
Teaching combines lectures, demonstrations, and interactive quizzes. Case studies, including neonatal monitoring and functional activation, illustrate applications.
Participants will gain a clear understanding of bNIRS capabilities, system design principles, and basic workflows for broadband data acquisition and analysis.
What will you learn?
- How bNIRS works
- What bNIRS measures
- Why bNIRS can be advantageous in neurosciences
- How to build a bNIRS system from hardware and software
- How to analyse data collected with bNIRS
- How bNIRS can be applied and examples of case studies
Course details
Course duration
3 hours
Prerequisites and/or other notes
N/A
Delivery plan
30 min: Introduction and Initial Set up.
45 min: Channel-Space Analysis: Preprocessing and GLM
45 min: Image-Space Analysis: Head models, co-registration and image reconstruction
15 min: Break.
45 min: Multimodal Analysis & Machine Learning
Why should you enroll in this course?
(1 )Communicate how broadband NIRS (bNIRS) works and demonstrate the principles behind capturing hundreds of wavelengths for metabolic and haemodynamic monitoring.
(2) Explain the process of building a bNIRS system, including key hardware components and essential software for data acquisition and workflow integration.
(3) Describe what bNIRS measures and discuss its advantages over standard fNIRS, particularly its ability to extract metabolic biomarkers relevant to neuroscience.
(4) Introduce the physiological role of cytochrome‐c‐oxidase and outline its characteristic responses in the context of cerebral metabolism and brain function.
(5) Present real‐world applications of bNIRS and demonstrate practical steps for processing, analysing, and interpreting broadband NIRS data.