{"id":8301,"date":"2025-10-28T09:14:46","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T13:14:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/neurophotonics\/?p=8301"},"modified":"2025-12-11T11:31:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T16:31:06","slug":"mapping-out-brain-studies-beyond-the-lab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/neurophotonics\/2025\/10\/28\/mapping-out-brain-studies-beyond-the-lab\/","title":{"rendered":"Meryem Y\u00fccel Leads a Group of fNIRS Experts to Advance Field Accessibility and Resources"},"content":{"rendered":"

A society of neuroscience experts are creating a dedicated hub of resources for fNIRS research.<\/span><\/i><\/h4>\n

by Danny Giancioppo<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Research Associate Professor Meryem Y\u00fccel<\/span><\/a> (BME) isn\u2019t just a technical director at the <\/span>Neurophotonics Center<\/span><\/a>\u2013\u2013she\u2019s also a leading expert in the field of functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), with a keen interest in community work. While there are many researchers at Boston University utilizing fNIRS, Y\u00fccel\u2019s unique approach of large-scale collaborative projects has brought about a new swath of introductory-to-advanced resources to the field. By bringing many minds together, Y\u00fccel believes that greater results can be achieved.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The NinjaNIRS System, as seen from the Neuroscience of the Everyday World Conference. https:\/\/pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/articles\/PMC11482177\/<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To understand Y\u00fccel\u2019s interest in interdisciplinary fNIRS research, she looks back to her high school years in Istanbul, Turkey. At the time, she was fascinated by both medicine and engineering, and she dreamed of a program that combined the two -unaware then of the existence of biomedical engineering. There she harbored an interest in brain function and medicine, and through the lens of engineering, discovered a particularly robust avenue for research.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c[With] modeling, you change parameters and simulate everything\u2014but in the end, it\u2019s still just a model,\u201d Y\u00fccel explains. \u201cI wanted to work with real data, measured directly from actual brains.\u201d This curiosity led her to explore fMRI, EEG, and fNIRS, which she describes as \u201cmodern tools\u201d for extracting information from the brain.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the promising aspects of fNIRS, according to Y\u00fccel, is its applicability to real-world scenarios. In her own words, you can apply fNIRS \u201cto many, many more ecologically valid situations compared to other imaging modalities.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

With such a variance in application, however, the fNIRS field comes with the hurdles of any burgeoning STEM field, including discrepancies and a growing baseline of information. Y\u00fccel endeavors to get ahead of the learning curve, and provide the necessary resources to supplement fNIRS scientists.\u00a0 To that end, she has been a part of several collaborative publications emphasizing inclusivity and best practices in the field.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf you consider all of these [projects], it\u2019s about how to do science with the best practices, but also [stressing] inclusive science and open science,\u201d Y\u00fccel explains. \u201cIt was also a mix of serendipity. The right people came together, the right ideas came together, and then it just worked out like that.\u201d Such projects came together through the joint work of the fNIRS community\u2013\u2013including the <\/span>Society for functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy<\/span><\/a> (SfNIRS), a group which aims to \u201cpromote the exchange of ideas, interdisciplinary collaboration, and education.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

One such example includes a recent paper on <\/span>Inclusivity in fNIRS Studies<\/span><\/a>. The study discusses the efficacy of fNIRS techniques on people with different hair and skin properties; for example, some characteristics are able to get a better signal than others. Y\u00fccel and team therefore looked into the scope of the issue, as well as creating a set of guidelines to tackle these differences.<\/span><\/p>\n

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A Sankey diagram from FRESH study highlighting the diversity of fNIRS signal processing choices across research labs. https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s42003-025-08412-1<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Another study was on the <\/span>fNIRS Reproducibility Study Hub (FRESH)<\/span><\/a> which examined how differences in data analysis pipelines affect scientific results. The study consisted of 38 labs and over 100 researchers worldwide who analyzed the same data set. After sharing all the details of their pipeline, authors compared each lab and researcher\u2019s hypothesis testing outcomes, incorporating aspects such as prior fNIRS experience and confidence. Despite using varied methods, nearly 80% of teams agreed on group-level findings, especially when hypotheses were strongly supported by prior literature.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Y\u00fccel points out that the project wasn\u2019t just about fNIRS research, but its practices. \u201cThe overarching question is how science itself is affected by the scientists themselves. How objective can we be?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

After gathering results, the research team found that researchers with more experience tended to produce more comparable data to one another than those with less experience. Which is exactly what Y\u00fccel and team had anticipated. \u201cThis is both about trying to motivate the field to be more open about their pipelines, sharing all the data, but also to encourage them to do best practices in their analysis so that we as a scientific community do better in general.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This finding aligned with earlier community efforts Y\u00fccel helped lead, such as the widely circulated \u201c<\/span>Best practices for fNIRS publications<\/span><\/a>\u201d paper, which provides guidelines to enhance reliability, repeatability, and traceability in reported fNIRS studies. The paper also includes a checklist to support both authors and reviewers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The swath of growing fNIRS research doesn\u2019t just end with the Society for fNIRS, however\u2013\u2013Y\u00fccel is also a member of the Board of Directors of<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>OpenfNIRS<\/span><\/a>, a committee driven by the community for community support, with the mission to foster the development of an fNIRS ecosystem, as well as to promote the open dissemination of related hardware and software. \u201cFor instance,\u201d she says, \u201c[if] someone collected data, analyzed it, and published it in whatever journal\u2013\u2013as a researcher, I should be able to go download that data set, analyze it and produce the same results. There\u2019s OpenNeuro and other websites that allow data share in standard formats.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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The timeline of the fNIRS Glossary Project. https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/40256456\/<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Possibly the largest quantitative undertaking has been the <\/span>The fNIRS glossary project<\/span><\/a>, which began in 2022 at an fNIRS conference. There was an open call for terms and definitions, utilizing prior resources as well as interested volunteers, which were then carefully reviewed by a panel of experts. Now newly published, the glossary is intended to serve as a foundational reference for the field\u2014but it remains a living document. The team plans to revisit and expand it every couple of years to incorporate emerging terms.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe will always have new terms,\u201d Y\u00fccel says, \u201cor maybe people will fix some of the terms we already put out there.\u201d For that reason, they store everything on a dedicated GitSpace, where they plan to update the glossary at least once every two years, around the next SfNIRS conference.<\/span><\/p>\n

A long-term fNIRS goal, Y\u00fccel imagines, would be to develop a widespread-use, everyday world monitoring device\u2013\u2013as she put it, a Fitbit for the brain. This could assist in recording brain health, stress levels, and other everyday fluctuations, such as when to exercise or do more cognitive tasks. But, this is more aspirational than concrete. Meanwhile, there are many interesting advancements already taking form in fNIRS research.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a multitude of convergent research projects involving fNIRS across BU\u2019s campus, reflecting the technology\u2019s versatility and growing impact. Y\u00fccel\u2019s team, for instance, has collaborated on efforts to integrate fNIRS into wearable systems that support neurorehabilitation, as well as to study gait disturbances in Parkinson\u2019s disease, language processing in individuals with aphasia, and cognitive development in children\u2014all within more naturalistic, real-world environments.<\/span><\/p>\n

For Y\u00fccel and her collaborators, the maneuverability of fNIRS is its greatest advantage. \u201cA child can sit on their parent\u2019s lap to have measurements taken, rather than being placed in an fMRI,\u201d she explains. \u201cIt brings neuroscience closer to everyday life\u2014and with that, closer to real-world impact.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A society of neuroscience experts are creating a dedicated hub of resources for fNIRS research. by Danny Giancioppo Research Associate Professor Meryem Y\u00fccel (BME) isn\u2019t just a technical director at the Neurophotonics Center\u2013\u2013she\u2019s also a leading expert in the field of functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), with a keen interest in community work. While there are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22337,"featured_media":7258,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[30,43],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/neurophotonics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8301"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/neurophotonics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/neurophotonics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/neurophotonics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22337"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/neurophotonics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8301"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/neurophotonics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8499,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/neurophotonics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8301\/revisions\/8499"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/neurophotonics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/neurophotonics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/neurophotonics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/neurophotonics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}