Dear NIRS Community,

Over the past several months, we have collected input from several
people on establishing a shared data format for NIRS experimental data.
A draft specification has been created for the proposed "Shared NIR
Format", a.k.a. SNIRF. This specification can be viewed at

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EKEMrB6CxmEGnzI4zi7MugHq318HRaR3M2i_vzRIPFU/edit



Our goal is for SNIRF to aid in the sharing and analysis of NIRS data
broadly, initially with a particular emphasis on fNIRS data of brain
activation. This goal will be met as hardware manufacturers support SNIRF for saving NIRS data, and analysis packages are able to load SNIRF compliant files
for analysis. 


This is still a draft specification. Our goal is to finalize this
specification by Feb 2013.



Please view the specification at the google doc URL indicated above and
use this forum to comment on any particular issues.



This specification has already benefited from the inputs of: Ted
Huppert, Hamid Dehghani, Takusige Katura, Jong Chul Ye, and Sungho Tak, as well as supporting approval from several others. We
believe that we have incorporated, or at least responded to all of their
comments.



One issue that remains to be resolved is how to handle calculated or
derived data types. The specification presently supports several raw
data types. It is desirable to add a data type for concentration
results. An issue we are struggling with is that every channel of data,
i.e. column of "d", has a corresponding descriptor in the "ml"
structure. The "ml" structure indexes the source, detector, and data
type for the corresponding data channel. It also indexes the wavelength.
For concentration, there is no wavelength. Thus, it seems that if we
have a data type for concentration, then the corresponding
"ml(n).WavelengthIndex" field would be ignored. In addition, the
"ml(n).DataTypeIndex" could be used to reference what chromophore is
stored in the data. The list of chromophores could be provided by
SD.Chromophores, which could be a string array with possible entries of
"HbO", "HbR", "H2O", "aa3", etc.



We are looking forward to more input from the community on establishing
SNIRF.



Sincerely,

Blaise Frederick

David Boas