The Standardization and Open Science Committee aims to foster a transparent, reliable, and collaborative future for the global fNIRS community.
Mission Statement
Our mission is to establish, disseminate, and promote best practices, standards, and open-science principles that ensure rigor, reproducibility, and interoperability across all aspects of fNIRS research and development.
Vision Statement
We envision functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) as a universally adopted, rigorously validated, and openly shared neuroimaging technology that empowers scientific discovery, advances clinical care, and enables brain monitoring in everyday life — enhancing knowledge, health, and well-being worldwide.
To achieve this vision, the Committee:
- Develops and maintains best-practice guidelines for hardware characterization, experimental design, data acquisition, analysis, and reporting — supporting both newcomers and experts in applying fNIRS with scientific rigor.
- Collaborates with international standards organizations (ISO/IEC) to establish and update formal technical standards for fNIRS instrumentation and cerebral oximetry.
- Promotes open and reproducible science, by encouraging data, code, and protocol sharing through community-driven frameworks such as SNIRF (Shared Near-Infrared File Format) and BIDS-fNIRS, as well as initiatives like the FRESH Reproducibility Study Hub.
- Facilitates transparent benchmarking and validation of hardware and software through open datasets, shared analysis pipelines, and phantom-based performance assessment.
- Supports education and outreach, empowering a diverse, global community of researchers, developers, and clinicians to contribute to the sustainable evolution of fNIRS methodology.
- Advocates for inclusivity and accessibility in fNIRS research, ensuring that open science benefits the entire field—from early-career researchers to clinical practitioners, across all regions and resource levels.
Members of the Committee
Meryem Ayşe Yücel (Chair, 2022-), is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Technical Director of the Neurophotonics Center at Boston University. She has been an active contributor to the field of fNIRS research, directing and performing numerous human imaging studies at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and now at Boston University. Her work focuses on developing advanced fNIRS signal processing algorithms and advancing the application of fNIRS in research, clinical settings, and everyday use. Her current interests include Neuroscience in the Everyday World, Open Science, and promoting inclusivity and equity in research.
Alexander von Lühmann (Chair, 2024-) is currently the head of the independent research group “Intelligent Biomedical Sensing (IBS)” at BIFOLD, Machine Learning Dept, TU Berlin. He is also a visiting researcher at the Neurophotonics Center of Boston University (BU NPC) and Chief Scientific Officer at NIRx Medical Technologies. Previously, he was R&D director at NIRx, post-doc at BU NPC, visiting researcher at the Martinos Center of Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, and Chief Technology Officer of Crely, a US-Singapore-based healthcare startup. He received his PhD (Dr.-Ing.) with distinction in 2018 from Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) and the M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in 2014/11.
Alessandro Torricelli, (Past Chair, 2016-2022), received the M.Sc. degree (summa cum laude) in electronics engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, in 1994, and the Ph.D. degree in physics from the Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy, in 1999. He is currently a Full Professor of physics with the Department of Physics, Politecnico di Milano. His research activity has been focused on radiation–matter interaction, on the development of innovative time-domain techniques based on the pulsed laser for monitoring and imaging biomedical applications.
Ilias Tachtsidis (Member, 2022-) is a Professor in Biomedical Engineering. He is a senior member of the Biomedical Optics Research Laboratory and heads the Multi-Modal Spectroscopy Group. His research is highly multi-disciplinary, crossing the boundaries between engineering, physics, neuroscience and clinical medicine. The technical focus of his work is the development and use of non-invasive optical instruments and techniques for monitoring brain oxygenation, hemodynamics and metabolism.
Xiaojun Cheng (Member, 2025-), is a Research Assistant Professor at the Neurophotonics Center, Boston University. With a background in theoretical physics, she works on developing physiological models based on realistic microvascular networks and studying wave interference effects and speckle pattern evolution in diverse optical systems. Her research also extends to other brain imaging modalities, including multiphoton microscopy (MPM), optical coherence tomography (OCT), functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), and diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS). By integrating theoretical modeling with experimental validation, her work aims to advance the quantitative interpretation of optical measurements and deepen our understanding of brain function in health and disease.
Bettina Sorger (Member, 2025-), is an Associate Professor at the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University. She has implemented clinical applications of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), developed BCIs based on real-time fMRI and has applied fMRI-based communication in non-responsive patients. Since taking a position at Maastricht University in 2011, she is heading the local hemodynamic BCI research group and has worked in several fields of fundamental and clinical neuroscience with a particular focus on extending fMRI-based communication BCIs to various sensory modalities (visual, auditory, and tactile) and transferring these methods to mobile fNIRS. Another focus of her current research is the implementation of hemodynamic brain signals for neurofeedback (therapy).
Yasuyo Minagawa (Member, 2025-) is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Keio University, where she leads the Minagawa Laboratory. Her research focuses on the learning of language from infancy to adolescence, the development of social cognitive capabilities, and the neural mechanisms that support these processes. In recent years, her work has extended to identifying characteristic changes in brain function that may predict developmental abnormalities in infants. To achieve this, her team conducts cross-functional research integrating brain function measurements with various behavioral indices from early infancy. Her academic background and expertise span Linguistic Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Cognitive Psychology.
Contact us
Would you like to be a member? Do you have comments or suggestions? Please contact us!
Standardization and Open Science Newsletter
S&OS Committee now has a newsletter that targets specifically the hardware and software developers. Please sign up at the end of this page.
Issue 1, November 2025 (pdf, English); (pdf, Chinese); (pdf, Japanese)
Issue 2, April 2026 (pdf, English)
Ongoing Activities of the Committee
Best Practices in Hardware Development
- ISO/IEC standards: A committee consisting of members from the Society has completed the revision of the international ISO/IEC standards on fNIRS (IEC 80601-2-71). This new standard (IEC 80601-2-71:2025) is now published at the ISO website.
- Phantom Campaign: A major milestone has been achieved with the publication of the IEC-compliant fNIRS standard phantom in two companion papers.
- Part 1 (implementation and usage) provides the first detailed description of a physical, experimentally validated phantom designed to meet IEC 80601-2-71 requirements. It demonstrates reproducible, wavelength-independent attenuation changes and shows successful performance testing across multiple commercial fNIRS systems.
- Part 2 (optical properties and modeling) characterizes the phantom’s optical properties and behavior using time-domain measurements and Monte Carlo simulations, providing a deeper understanding of how material properties and geometry influence performance.
- Standard protocols for performance assessment of instrumentation: SC supports setting up basic tests and tools (homogeneous/heterogeneous phantoms) to assess instrumentation (CW/FD/TD fNIRS as well as DCS) performance. PoliMi Milan and PTB Berlin have developed protocols for performance assessment of photon migration instruments (e.g. MEDPHOT, BIP, nEUROPT). Similarly, protocols for DCS characterization are available at ICFO Barcelona [Cortese et al., 2021, https://doi.org/10.1364/BOE.423071]. We have provided the links to the published papers on protocols here.
- Standard protocols for in vivo validation: SC supports developing protocols for easy to implement in vivo tests for basic validation of fNIRS.
Best Practices in Experimental Design and Protocol
- fNIRS signal is confounded by systemic effects. It is important to consider these confounding signals both before the experiment as well as during data processing. We provide a list of publications to introduce the topic to new fNIRS users.
- We provide here some useful links on the procedures and tools for probe placement and anatomical registration.
Best Practices in Data Analysis
- Database of optical properties and specific absorption: We provide and aim to further contribute to the standard databases of optical properties (in vivo optical properties of the human head (for guiding realistic simulations, for supporting data analysis, and for preparation of realistic phantom) and of specific absorption of tissue constituents (for estimating hemodynamic parameters, determining the relevance of other constituents like water, bone, and lipids). Please find in the link below the links to the available repositories.
- Performance assessment of data analysis pipelines: A major milestone has been achieved with the publication of a large-scale community study in Communications Biology, demonstrating that fNIRS reproducibility varies with data quality, analysis pipelines, and researcher experience. This work provides clear empirical evidence of variability in outcomes across independent analyses of the same dataset and underscores the need for standardized, transparent workflows. Building on this, ongoing efforts such as the FRESH initiative focus on benchmarking pipelines and supporting reproducible analysis practices.
Standards for data format and organization
- Standards for data format and organization: The fNIRS community has established the SNIRF file format for fNIRS data, and this format has now been incorporated into the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) standard for the organization of neuroimaging datasets. Now the fNIRS community should endeavor to broadly adopt this dataset organization specification. You can find more information on SNIRF and BIDS here.
- Standard terminology: A common fNIRS terminology is crucial for understanding our fellow researchers. The fNIRS Glossary Project is intended to develop a community-sourced glossary of terms relating to fNIRS via a consensus-based methodology.