LIONirs toolbox design for fNIRS data analysis.

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a non-invasive neuroimaging technique. Analogous to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), it measures changes of cerebral blood oxygenation related to neuronal processes in cortical regions. In order to facilitate fNIRS data analysis, we developed a MATLAB toolbox and we describe here examples of functionalities. The LIONirs toolbox uses the MATLAB Batch System of SPM toolbox and provides a complete visual interface for data inspection and topographical representation during each stage of the analysis. This makes it a user-friendly tool for those researchers that do not have programming skills. We show this property as well as its flexibility and other capabilities by, creating a processing pipeline and applying it to data gathered from a group of 14 healthy subjects when they perform a passive story-listening task.