Theory and experiments on time-resolved reflectance from adult heads for functional tomographic imaging of brain activities

Abstract

Finite difference time domain (FDTD) analysis has been formulated for predicting time-resolved reflectance from an adult head model with brain grooves containing a non-scattering layer. Mean delay (MD) dependences on source detector separation ( d ) and time-resolved reflectance calculated using the FDTD analysis were compared with in vivo experiments of human heads. It is shown that the theoretical and experimental MD dependences on d and the time-resolved reflectance are well predicted by FDTD analysis. These results have shown that tomographic imaging of brain activities is promising, which improves depth sensitivities by enhancing the contribution of late photons in time-resolved systems.