fNIRS-BIDS, the Brain Imaging Data Structure Extended to Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an increasingly popular neuroimaging technique that measures cortical hemodynamic activity in a non-invasive and portable fashion. Although the fNIRS community has been successful in disseminating several open-source processing tools and a standard file format (SNIRF), the development of reproducible research and sharing of fNIRS data amongst researchers has been hindered by a lack of standards and clarity over how study data should be organized and stored. This problem is not new in neuroimaging (and science in general), and it became evident years ago with the proliferation of publicly available functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) datasets.To solve this critical issue, the neuroimaging community created the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) that specifies standards for how datasets should be organized to facilitates sharing and reproducibility of science. Since then, BIDS has been extended to dozens of neuroimaging modalities including EEG, MEG, PET and many others.In this paper, we present the extension of BIDS for fNIRS data alongside tools that may assist researchers in formatting existing and new data with the goal of promoting public disseminations of fNIRS datasets.