ActiView

Brain cortical activation analysis is important for understanding the causes of neurological disorders and relevant brain mechanisms. Over the past decades, various studies have been published on the brain functional activities and cortical activation analysis using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The fNIRS yields outputs similar to the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals of the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and has an advantage that can measure higher temporal resolution than fMRI. In this paper, we developed a MATLAB toolbox, referred to as ActiView, for analyzing the cortical activation on realtime. Although the existence of numerous analysis toolboxes for fNIRS, most of these are not easy to use because they involve numerous steps, coefficients, anatomic information, 3-dimensions coordinator, and related files. Given that ActiView consists of a simple and intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), users can lightly analyze the brain cortical activation by using fNIRS signals. To investigate the developed toolbox, the hand clenching task experiment---extensively used in brain functional activity studies---was applied. The experimental results elicited the realtime brain cortical activation results compare to the offline brain cortical activity that was analyzed using NIRS SPM---one of the most extensively used NIRS analysis toolboxes.