From Channel-Pair Connectivity to Brain Networks: An Open Graph Theoretical Pipeline for fNIRS Hyperscanning

Abstract

Despite the growing use of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning to record brain activity simultaneously from interacting individuals in naturalistic settings, most analyses quantify functional connectivity separately for each channel pair. The resulting collection of pairwise estimates is difficult to integrate into a network-level characterization of intra- and inter-brain organization. Here, we present an open, configuration-driven Python toolkit that transforms preprocessed fNIRS hyperscanning time series into functional connectivity graphs. The toolkit constructs a bipartite inter-brain network for each dyad and separate intra-brain networks for each participant, computes node- and graph-level measures, and exports adjacency matrices, edge lists, analysis-ready summary tables, reproducibility metadata, and standardized visualizations. Dataset-specific parameters, including directory structure, participant naming, channel selection, epoch extraction, and edge-retention criteria, are defined in a human-readable YAML configuration file, enabling the same workflow to accommodate differently organized datasets without changes to the source code. We illustrate the pipeline using a representative recording from a mother-infant fNIRS hyperscanning dataset and present the resulting network outputs. The toolkit provides a reproducible framework for moving from pairwise functional connectivity estimates to network-level analyses of dyadic and individual brain organization.