fNIRS-QC: Crowd-Sourced Creation of a Dataset and Machine Learning Model for fNIRS Quality Control

Despite technological advancements in functional Near Infra-Red Spectroscopy (fNIRS) and a rise in the application of the fNIRS in neuroscience experimental designs, the processing of fNIRS data remains characterized by a high number of heterogeneous approaches, implicating the scientific reproducibility and interpretability of the results. For example, a manual inspection is still necessary to assess the quality and subsequent retention of collected fNIRS signals for analysis. Machine Learning (ML) approaches are well-positioned to provide a unique contribution to fNIRS data processing by automating and standardizing methodological approaches for quality control, where ML models can produce objective and reproducible results. However, any successful ML application is grounded in a high-quality dataset of labeled training data, and unfortunately, no such dataset is currently available for fNIRS signals. In this work, we introduce fNIRS-QC, a platform designed for the crowd-sourced creation of a quality control fNIRS dataset. In particular, we (a) composed a dataset of 4385 fNIRS signals; (b) created a web interface to allow multiple users to manually label the signal quality of 510 10 s fNIRS segments. Finally, (c) a subset of the labeled dataset is used to develop a proof-of-concept ML model to automatically assess the quality of fNIRS signals. The developed ML models can serve as a more objective and efficient quality control check that minimizes error from manual inspection and the need for expertise with signal quality control.