fNIRS Glossary Project

The fNIRS Glossary Project is a community-sourced glossary  (i.e., useful nomenclature and related symbols) of terms related to fNIRS technology. The glossary includes terms related to continuous-wave (CW), frequency domain (FD), and time domain (TD) NIRS systems, covering the experimental design, pre-processing, data analysis, neuroscience, physics and mathematical areas that are crucial to understanding and using fNIRS successfully and reliably in research, industry and clinical settings.

You can either browse the terms or use the search bar below to get more details about each term.

We have a Forum for discussion or feedback on the existing terms. If you’re missing a term, please use this Google Form to submit it. Before submitting a new term, please use the search function to ensure that the term is missing and also has not been added as a synonym to an existing term.

The fNIRS Glossary Project Team

Katharina Stute, Louisa K. Gossé, Samuel Montero-Hernandez, Guy A. Perkins, Meryem A. Yücel, Simone Cutini, Turgut Durduran, Ann-Christine Ehlis, Marco Ferrari, Judit Gervain, Rickson C. Mesquita, Felipe Orihuela-Espina, Valentina Quaresima, Felix Scholkmann, Ilias Tachtsidis, Alessandro Toricelli, Heidrun Wabnitz, Arjun G. Yodh, Stefan A. Carp, Hamid Dehghani, Qianqian Fang, Sergio Fantini, Yoko Hoshi, Haijing Niu, Hellmuth Obrig, Franziska Klein, Christina Artemenko, Aahana Bajracharya, Beatrix Barth, Christian Bartkowski, Lénaïc Borot, Chiara Bulgarelli, David R. Busch, Małgorzata Chojak, Jason M. DeFreitas, Laura Diprossimo, Thomas Dresler, Aykut Eken, Mahmoud M. Elsherif, Lauren L. Emberson, Anna Exner, Talukdar Raian Ferdous, Abigail Fiske, Samuel H. Forbes, Jessica Gemignani, Christian Gerloff, Ségolène M. R. Guérin, Edgar Guevara, Antonia F de C Hamilton, S. M. Hadi Hosseini, Divya Jain, Anastasia N. Kerr-German, Haiyan Kong, Agnes Kroczek, Jason K. Longhurst, Michael Lührs, Rob J. MacLennan, David M. A. Mehler, Kimberly L. Meidenbauer, David Moreau, Murat C. Mutlu, Renato Orti, Ishara Paranawithana, Paola Pinti, Ali Rahimpour Jounghani, Vanessa Reindl, Nicholas A. Ross, Sara Sanchez-Alonso, Oliver Seidel-Marzi, Mohinish Shukla, Syed A. Usama, Musa Talati, Grégoire Vergotte, M. Atif Yaqub, Chia-Chuan Yu, Hanieh Zainodini

Citation

If you use the fNIRS Glossary Project to support your manuscript writing or terminology standardization, please cite the following publication:

Stute, Katharina et al. “The fNIRS glossary project: a consensus-based resource for functional near-infrared spectroscopy terminology.” Neurophotonics vol. 12,2 (2025): 027801. doi:10.1117/1.NPh.12.2.027801

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fNIRS Glossary Project Figures

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