Light Propagation In Head Model Research Articles

Analysis of Light Propagation in a Realistic Head Model by a Hybrid Method for Optical Brain Function Measurement

Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is used to measure the change in blood volume and oxygenation in the brain cortex induced by functional brain activation. The development of an adequate model to calculate light propagation in the head is very important because the light is strongly scattered in the tissue and this causes ambiguity in the volume of tissue interrogated with a source–detector pair of the NIRS instrument. In this study, a two-dimensional realistic head model is generated from a MRI scan of a human adult head. The light propagation in the head model is calculated by the hybrid Monte Carlo–diffusion method to obtain the change in detected intensity caused by a focal absorption change in the grey matter or in the white matter to discuss the relationship between the depth of the activated region and the sensitivity of the NIRS signal. The sensitivity to the activated region in the white matter steeply decreases with an increase of the depth of the activated region because the spatial sensitivity profile is mainly confined to the grey matter. The contribution of the focal brain activity to the NIRS signal is determined by not only the depth of the activated region from the head surface but also the depth of the activated region from the brain surface.

Hybrid Monte Carlo-diffusion method for light propagation in tissue with a low-scattering region.

The heterogeneity of the tissues in a head, especially the low-scattering cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) layer surrounding the brain has previously been shown to strongly affect light propagation in the brain. The radiosity-diffusion method, in which the light propagation in the CSF layer is assumed to obey the radiosity theory, has been employed to predict the light propagation in head models. Although the CSF layer is assumed to be a nonscattering region in the radiosity-diffusion method, fine arachnoid trabeculae cause faint scattering in the CSF layer in real heads. A novel approach, the hybrid Monte Carlo-diffusion method, is proposed to calculate the head models, including the low-scattering region in which the light propagation does not obey neither the diffusion approximation nor the radiosity theory. The light propagation in the high-scattering region is calculated by means of the diffusion approximation solved by the finite-element method and that in the low-scattering region is predicted by the Monte Carlo method. The intensity and mean time of flight of the detected light for the head model with a low-scattering CSF layer calculated by the hybrid method agreed well with those by the Monte Carlo method, whereas the results calculated by means of the diffusion approximation included considerable error caused by the effect of the CSF layer. In the hybrid method, the time-consuming Monte Carlo calculation is employed only for the thin CSF layer, and hence, the computation time of the hybrid method is dramatically shorter than that of the Monte Carlo method.