Abstract
Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a non-invasive neuroimaging modality that measures the concentration changes of oxy-hemoglobin (HbO) and de-oxy hemoglobin (HbR) at the same time. It is an emerging cortical imaging modality with a good temporal resolution that is acceptable for brain-computer interface applications. Researchers have developed several methods in last two decades to extract the neuronal activation related waveform from the observed fNIRS time series. But still there is no standard method for analysis of fNIRS data. This article presents a brief review of existing methodologies to model and analyze the activation signal. The purpose of this review article is to give a general overview of variety of existing methodologies to extract useful information from measured fNIRS data including pre-processing steps, effects of differential path length factor (DPF), variations and attributes of hemodynamic response function (HRF), extraction of evoked response, removal of physiological noises, instrumentation, and environmental noises and resting/activation state functional connectivity. Finally, the challenges in the analysis of fNIRS signal are summarized.
Highlights
Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is an emerging non-invasive brain-imaging methodology that utilizes near-infrared (NIR) light of 650–900 nm to determine cerebral oxygenation, blood flow, and the metabolic status of a localized region of the brain (Saager and Berger, 2008; Yamada et al, 2009; Khan et al, 2014; Molavi et al, 2014; Santosa et al, 2014; Naseer and Hong, 2015)
Brain engineering is a multi-disciplinary field with a focus to extract useful information from cortical signal observed by neuroimaging equipment
In this article recent advancements in the analysis of the optical signal observed through functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) are summarized
Summary
Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is an emerging non-invasive brain-imaging methodology that utilizes near-infrared (NIR) light of 650–900 nm to determine cerebral oxygenation, blood flow, and the metabolic status of a localized region of the brain (Saager and Berger, 2008; Yamada et al, 2009; Khan et al, 2014; Molavi et al, 2014; Santosa et al, 2014; Naseer and Hong, 2015). Activation in a particular part of the brain causes an increase in the regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) (Zhang et al, 2011b; Umeyama and Yamada, 2013; Kopton and Kenning, 2014). The rate of rCBF increase exceeds that of the regional cerebral oxygen metabolic rate (rCMRO2), which is the major cause of de-oxy hemoglobin (HbR) decrease in venous blood (Sitaram et al, 2009). Details on the pros and cones of fNIRS can be found in Gervain et al (2011), Barati et al (2013), and Tak and Ye (2013)
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