The User Interface

The user interface of Turbo-Satori mainly consists of four parts with specific settings and options.

The real-time analysis setup window, which includes configurations to set up the real-time analysis, as well as connection, plotting and control settings.
The channel selection and analysis window contains the basic parameters and table to perform real-time analysis of the available channels.
The preprocessing window allows to change the preprocessing parameters for raw wavelength data, as well as for the HbO/Hb converted data. Additionally, the status information is shown at the bottom of the window.
The main application window provides three different plots and a layout view, frequency spectrogram and log window area (numbers 5-8), showing useful information or the layout of the sources, detectors and channels.
The time course of the selected channels (or average) for Raw wavelength 1 and/or 2, HbO and/or Hb signal.
The event related average of the selected channels’ time course.
The combined plot for all marked channels.
The layout view, (layout shown in figure, see tab bar at the bottom).

These interface parts can be freely rearranged or hidden to limit the data representation to only the currently desired information. The first part of the interface (see number 1) allows the user to configure global settings of analysis, controls and plotting. It also contains the control settings to start / stop the real-time, online or offline analysis. On the left side of the interface (spectrogram), all available channels are displaying the beta value of each channel at the current point in time using the currently defined contrasts. The arrangement of the channels starts with the first source and first detector in the top left corner and continues to the source and detector n in the bottom right, following the definition in the NIRStar data acquisition software allowing to immediately observe whether the expected pattern is present and ensuring data quality.

The second part of the interface covers the channel selection for the plotting interface, using a standard table, which also shows basic statistical analysis results. The table allows an inspection of beta-values of the oxy-hemoglobin (HbO) and deoxy-hemoglobin (Hb) time courses in individual channels, based on a real-time general linear model (GLM) (see below) calculation. It is also possible to average selected channels and get a separate analysis and plot for the average. At the bottom of this interface section, one can set specific contrasts of each available condition defined in the experiment. Part three of the interface handles the preprocessing of the raw or converted HbO/Hb data. More details about the filtering options are described in the next sub-section of the article. At the bottom of this interface section, basic information about the experiment and settings are available.

Most of the interface (see number 4 in Fig. 1) is used to visualize and inspect time course data. There are two different types of data shown. The first one is presented in the top left (individual time course of selected channels, number 5 in Fig. 1), top right (event related averages of each condition for each selected channel, number 6 in Fig. 1) and bottom left (combined overview of all channels, number 7 in Fig. 1) of this interface section. These parts represent the individual time course of the channels and allow to inspect each channel individually. At the same time, they provide an overview of all channels, which makes it possible to check for overall artifacts in the data or in individual channels. The event related average plot gives more insights in condition based response profiles, allowing to compare different tasks, as well as overall performance and data quality.

In the bottom right of this section, a layout overview is presented, which shows the sources, detectors and the respective channels on a predefined montage (number 8 in Fig. 1). The source and detector positions are stored with respect to the underlying montage image. They can be individually adapted using an integrated layout manager or loaded from the stored information, if re-analyzing a dataset(stored with NIRStar software bundled using a NIRx device).

The configuration of the sections 1 to 3 is very flexible, allowing to choose where to place each part, or to have it as a floating interface for multi-screen configurations.

A status bar, which is placed below the main application window, shows current events, processing and plotting times during the experiment.

You can find more information about the single windows in the specific subsection of this guide.