Effects of Individual Research Practices on fNIRS Signal Quality and Latent Characteristics

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an increasingly popular tool for cross-cultural neuroimaging studies. However, the reproducibility and comparability of fNIRS studies is still an open issue in the scientific community. The paucity of experimental practices and the lack of clear guidelines regarding fNIRS use contribute to undermining the reproducibility of results. For this reason, much effort is now directed at assessing the impact of heterogeneous experimental practices in creating divergent fNIRS results. The current work aims to assess differences in fNIRS signal quality in data collected by two different labs in two different cohorts: Singapore (N=74) and Italy (N=84). Random segments of 20s were extracted from each channel in each participant’s NIRScap and 1280 deep features were obtained using a deep learning model trained to classify the quality of fNIRS data. Two datasets were generated: ALL dataset (segments with bad and good data quality) and GOOD dataset (segments with good quality). Each dataset was divided into train and test partitions, which were used to train and evaluate the performance of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model in classifying the cohorts from signal quality features. Results showed that the SG cohort had significantly higher occurrences of bad signal quality in the majority of the fNIRS channels. Moreover, the SVM correctly classified the cohorts when using the ALL dataset. However, the performance dropped almost completely (except for five channels) when the SVM had to classify the cohorts using data from the GOOD dataset. These results suggest that fNIRS raw data obtained by different labs might possess different levels of quality as well as different latent characteristics beyond quality per se. The current study highlights the importance of defining clear guidelines in the conduction of fNIRS experiments in the reporting of data quality in fNIRS manuscripts.