Layout Manager

The layout manager shows the montage of an fNIRS experiment and visualizes the statistical parameters as connection strength and color coding between sources and detectors. In the bottom of the layout window, an editor is provided to manually create layouts for Turbo-Satori. To show the editor area, click and hold the little dotted bar at the bottom of the layout window and move it upwards. To hide it, follow the same procedure, but move it downwards.

A montage is automatically loaded, if it was defined during recording in NIRStar. An additional *_probeInfo.mat* is then stored in the fNIRS data folder of the specific experiment. Turbo-Satori tries to load this file during loading of a .hdr or .sri file, or at the beginning of a connection to NIRStar using the LSL interface (NIRx SDK Interface does not provide layout information). If no montage was found, the last loaded layout file will be kept in the layout view.

To manually load a layout file, navigate to the Tools menu and select the Layout Manager. Here you can select either predefined montages or load a layout from a file. Supported file formats are .mat (see NIRx support material) and .slf (a layout file for Turbo-Satori). A description of the .slf format can be found at the bottom of this section.

Layout Editor

The editor can be used to create Turbo-Satori layout files manually. To do this, enable the Enable Editing check box. Click on Add Source or Add Detector to add a source or detector to the layout view. These sources and detectors can now freely be moved around by clicking and holding the cursor on the specific source or detector and move it to the target position.

To connect sources and detectors, right click on a source or detector and navigate to the context menu Add Connection with Node. Here you will now find a list of possible sources or detectors to which you can create a connection. The same mechanism holds to remove a connection.

There is also a convenient function to remove all connections from a source or detector to all other sources or detectors.

Heartbeat indicator

Additionally, the detected heartbeat is shown as moving pattern on top of the specific channel, as shown below:

The .slf format

The .slf format is a basic text file containing source and detector positions, as well as edge information connecting sources and detectors.

First, all SourceNodes need to be defined. Each SourceNode (SN) is indicated by an SN pattern in the beginning of the line, followed by the source number, which is separated with a space. The next two values indicate the position of the node on the background image (X and Y coordinates). The coordinates range from X=0 and Y=0, indicating the top left corner, to X=n and Y=n being the bottom right corner.

After the sources, we define the DetectorNodes. The procedure is the same as with SourceNodes, only changing SN to DN.

The last definition is the declaration of the edges connecting sources and detectors. These are defined starting with ED, followed by the edge ID. The next two digits represent first, the source, and second, the detector. As an example, ED 1 4 5 would mean a connection with the ID 1 connecting source 4 and detector 5.

The last parameter at the bottom of the .slf document defines the background image that should be loaded. This image is automatically scaled to the layout screen. The image can be in different formats (e.g., .png, .jpg, .gif, …). The path can be defined as a relative (from the .slf file location) or as an absolute path.

The text files can be easily adapted using a normal text editor, which allows to easily add and remove sources and detectors.

NOTE: The order of the sources, detectors and edges must be sorted in ascending order.