NIRS & EEG

Electroencephalography (EEG) and NIRS both offer information about brain function, complementing each other in their ability to resolve information about the spatial and temporal characteristics of neural activity. The electrical potentials in brain tissue can be measured by EEG with high temporal resolution. NIRS measures the changes in oxygenation and blood volume, which reflects a different aspect of neural activity with high spatial information.

Our NIRS equipment does not interfere with EEG signals and in one headcap you can do EEG and NIRS simultaneous recordings. The EEG can be provided by either the TMSi systems or the Neuroelectrics ones, offering altogether up to 54 fNIRS channels and up to 64 EEG channels in a wireless configuration.

For more advanced studies demanding higher spatial density and stationary measurements, it is possible to combine the OxyMon with the TMSi SAGA reaching up to 112 fNIRS channels and 128 EEG channels.

NIRS & EEG & tES

Combine transcranial electrical stimulation (tES: tDCS, tACS, tRNS) and electroencephalography (EEG) with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in one single headset.

The Starstim fNIRS package includes Neuroelectrics® StarStim (tES and EEG) and Artinis Brite / Brite Lite, both non-invasive and wearable technologies. It allows clinicians and researchers to measure resting-state and task-related cortical activity (EEG) and/or hemodynamics (fNIRS) before, during, and after transcranial electrical stimulation in real-world settings.

In addition to the equipment provided, the Starstim NIRS package includes online assistance by Silverline Research on how to integrate these two state-of-the-art devices or to tailor the Starstim with another neuroimaging device specifically according to your research or clinical needs. Silverline Research expertise can also provide specialized online or on-site training (1-5 days) to integrate tES with neuroimaging (EEG and fNIRS) through every step as well as other neurophysiological techniques (TMS, fMRI) and applications (cognition, motor control, sports and virtual reality).

OptEStim software

OptEStim is add-on software compatible with the Starstim NIC2 and Brite/ Brite Lite Oxysoft software, which offers advanced software-level capabilities for brain-state determination on an easy-to-use graphical user interface that allows real-time monitoring and analysis of EEG and fNIRS metrics using the streaming feature (e.g. EEG-Alpha peak, COG and fNIRS-O2Hbmean), including proprietary algorithms to determine heart rate (HR) and variability (HRV) from fNIRS signals.

The software also provides different open-loop (i.e., standard tES protocols) and closed-loop (Entrainment and Conditional programs included) programs to run experiments using the Starstim tES parameters (tDCS, tACS, tRNS and hybrid tDCS/tACS/tRNS) using EEG and/or fNIRS metrics as user-defined thresholds to close the loop. The Entrainment closed-loop program allows the user to define the EEG metric (e.g., initial Alpha peak power) to close the loop; while the Conditional closed-loop program allows both EEG (e.g., Alpha COG, Gamma peak power) and fNIRS (Mean O2Hb, HHb, HR, HRV) metrics to set the threshold for tES.