By Sergio Novi
The coming months hold great opportunities for advancing your fNIRS skills! Following the recent fNIRS course in Boston University (November, 2017), the Biomedical Optics Lab at the University of Campinas (Dr. R. Mesquita, PI) and the NIRS Optical Lab at the University of Pittsburgh (Dr. T. Huppert, PI) will provide fNIRS courses.
The course at the Biomedical Optics Lab (Campinas, Brazil) will be an introductory, hands-on course in which researchers will have the chance to acquire their own data and analyze it. Most of the course will employ the widely used Homer2 toolbox and the AtlasViewer package. This course will be a two-day (April 6-7) intensive training session focusing on foundational fNIRS user topics, including experimental design, data preprocessing and group analysis.
The NIRS Optical Lab (Pittsburg, USA) will focus on more advanced fNIRS topics, such as image reconstruction, connectivity and multimodal imaging. This fNIRS training course is suited for researchers who are more familiar with the fNIRS technology. In particular, it is recommended that attendees have some knowledge on introductory statistics, signal processing and MatLab. Data analysis will be performed using the group’s own NIRS-toolbox. The course will take place on May 25-26.
For those who are not familiar with fNIRS analysis, we recommend attending the introductory course in Brazil, where you can acquire fNIRS fundamentals. Next, you can strengthen your skills in Pittsburg by attending the NIRS Optical Lab course. Great news for the fNIRS community is that the Boston, Campina, and UCL groups are joining forces to create standardized materials for fNIRS courses. Instructors are already sharing lectures and exercises to establish consistency and maintain quality across different courses.
Important Links:
1 – Campinas
http://brainncongress.wixsite.com/2018/mini-courses
http://mesquitarc.wixsite.com/lobunicamp
2 – Pittsburgh