Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy and Its Clinical Application in the Field of Neuroscience: Advances and Future Directions

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Abstract

Similar to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) detects the changes of hemoglobin species inside the brain, but via differences in optical absorption. Within the near-infrared spectrum, light can penetrate biological tissues and be absorbed by chromophores, such as oxyhemoglobin and deoxyhemoglobin. What makes fNIRS more advantageous is its portability and potential for long-term monitoring. This paper reviews the basic mechanisms of fNIRS and its current clinical applications, the limitations toward more widespread clinical usage of fNIRS, and current efforts to improve the temporal and spatial resolution of fNIRS toward robust clinical usage within subjects. Oligochannel fNIRS is adequate for estimating global cerebral function and it has become an important tool in the critical care setting for evaluating cerebral oxygenation and autoregulation in patients with stroke and traumatic brain injury. When it comes to a more sophisticated utilization, spatial and temporal resolution becomes critical. Multichannel NIRS has improved the spatial resolution of fNIRS for brain mapping in certain task modalities, such as language mapping. However, averaging and group analysis are currently required, limiting its clinical use for monitoring and real-time event detection in individual subjects. Advances in signal processing have moved fNIRS toward individual clinical use for detecting certain types of seizures, assessing autonomic function and cortical spreading depression. However, its lack of accuracy and precision has been the major obstacle toward more sophisticated clinical use of fNIRS. The use of high-density whole head optode arrays, precise sensor locations relative to the head, anatomical co-registration, short-distance channels, and multi-dimensional signal processing can be combined to improve the sensitivity of fNIRS and increase its use as a wide-spread clinical tool for the robust assessment of brain function.

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Pathophysiology of Migraine: A Disorder of Sensory Processing.

Peter J Goadsby, Philip Holland, Margarida Martins-Oliveira … (2017)

Plaguing humans for more than two millennia, manifest on every continent studied, and with more than one billion patients having an attack in any year, migraine stands as the sixth most common cause of disability on the planet. The pathophysiology of migraine has emerged from a historical consideration of the "humors" through mid-20th century distraction of the now defunct Vascular Theory to a clear place as a neurological disorder. It could be said there are three questions: why, how, and when? Why: migraine is largely accepted to be an inherited tendency for the brain to lose control of its inputs. How: the now classical trigeminal durovascular afferent pathway has been explored in laboratory and clinic; interrogated with immunohistochemistry to functional brain imaging to offer a roadmap of the attack. When: migraine attacks emerge due to a disorder of brain sensory processing that itself likely cycles, influenced by genetics and the environment. In the first, premonitory, phase that precedes headache, brain stem and diencephalic systems modulating afferent signals, light-photophobia or sound-phonophobia, begin to dysfunction and eventually to evolve to the pain phase and with time the resolution or postdromal phase. Understanding the biology of migraine through careful bench-based research has led to major classes of therapeutics being identified: triptans, serotonin 5-HT1B/1D receptor agonists; gepants, calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) receptor antagonists; ditans, 5-HT1F receptor agonists, CGRP mechanisms monoclonal antibodies; and glurants, mGlu5 modulators; with the promise of more to come. Investment in understanding migraine has been very successful and leaves us at a new dawn, able to transform its impact on a global scale, as well as understand fundamental aspects of human biology.

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Frequencies contributing to functional connectivity in the cerebral cortex in "resting-state" data.

D. Cordes, V M Haughton, K Arfanakis … (2001)

In subjects performing no specific cognitive task ("resting state"), time courses of voxels within functionally connected regions of the brain have high cross-correlation coefficients ("functional connectivity"). The purpose of this study was to measure the contributions of low frequencies and physiological noise to cross-correlation maps. In four healthy volunteers, task-activation functional MR imaging and resting-state data were acquired. We obtained four contiguous slice locations in the "resting state" with a high sampling rate. Regions of interest consisting of four contiguous voxels were selected. The correlation coefficient for the averaged time course and every other voxel in the four slices was calculated and separated into its component frequency contributions. We calculated the relative amounts of the spectrum that were in the low-frequency (0 to 0.1 Hz), the respiratory-frequency (0.1 to 0.5 Hz), and cardiac-frequency range (0.6 to 1.2 Hz). For each volunteer, resting-state maps that resembled task-activation maps were obtained. For the auditory and visual cortices, the correlation coefficient depended almost exclusively on low frequencies (<0.1 Hz). For all cortical regions studied, low-frequency fluctuations contributed more than 90% of the correlation coefficient. Physiological (respiratory and cardiac) noise sources contributed less than 10% to any functional connectivity MR imaging map. In blood vessels and cerebrospinal fluid, physiological noise contributed more to the correlation coefficient. Functional connectivity in the auditory, visual, and sensorimotor cortices is characterized predominantly by frequencies slower than those in the cardiac and respiratory cycles. In functionally connected regions, these low frequencies are characterized by a high degree of temporal coherence.

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Three-dimensional probabilistic anatomical cranio-cerebral correlation via the international 10-20 system oriented for transcranial functional brain mapping.

Masako Okamoto, Haruka Dan, Kuniko Sakamoto … (2004)

The recent advent of multichannel near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) has expanded its technical potential for human brain mapping. However, NIRS measurement has a technical drawback in that it measures cortical activities from the head surface without anatomical information of the object to be measured. This problem is also found in transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) that transcranially activates or inactivates the cortical surface. To overcome this drawback, we examined cranio-cerebral correlation using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) via the guidance of the international 10-20 system for electrode placement, which had originally been developed for electroencephalography. We projected the 10-20 standard cranial positions over the cerebral cortical surface. After examining the cranio-cerebral correspondence for 17 healthy adults, we normalized the 10-20 cortical projection points of the subjects to the standard Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) and Talairach stereotactic coordinates and obtained their probabilistic distributions. We also expressed the anatomical structures for the 10-20 cortical projection points probabilistically. Next, we examined the distance between the cortical surface and the head surface along the scalp and created a cortical surface depth map. We found that the locations of 10-20 cortical projection points in the standard MNI or Talairach space could be estimated with an average standard deviation of 8 mm. This study provided an initial step toward establishing a three-dimensional probabilistic anatomical platform that enables intra- and intermodal comparisons of NIRS and TMS brain imaging data.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Wei-Liang Chen: URI : http://loop.frontiersin.org/people/333776/overview

Julie Wagner: URI : http://loop.frontiersin.org/people/1017835/overview

Lisa Conant: URI : http://loop.frontiersin.org/people/114469/overview

Brendan Quirk: URI : http://loop.frontiersin.org/people/923864/overview

Scott A. Beardsley: URI : http://loop.frontiersin.org/people/10098/overview

Harry T. Whelan: URI : http://loop.frontiersin.org/people/139641/overview

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Front Neurosci

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Front Neurosci

Journal ID (publisher-id): Front. Neurosci.

Title: Frontiers in Neuroscience

Publisher: Frontiers Media S.A.

ISSN (Print): 1662-4548

ISSN (Electronic): 1662-453X

Publication date (Electronic): 09 July 2020

Publication date Collection: 2020

Volume: 14

Electronic Location Identifier: 724

Affiliations

[1] ¹Department of Neurology, Medical College of Wisconsin , Milwaukee, WI, United States

[2] ²Department of Neurology, Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin , Milwaukee, WI, United States

[3] ³School of Medicine, University of Washington , Seattle, WA, United States

[4] ⁴Department of Biochemical Engineering, Marquette University and Medical College of Wisconsin , Milwaukee, WI, United States

Author notes

Edited by: Ulrich G. Hofmann, Medical Center – University of Freiburg, Germany

Reviewed by: Wei-Peng Teo, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; Keum-Shik Hong, Pusan National University, South Korea

*Correspondence: Harry T. Whelan, hwhelan@ 123456mcw.edu

This article was submitted to Neural Technology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience

Article

DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2020.00724

PMC ID: 7364176

PubMed ID: 32742257

SO-VID: 21e677b0-e102-4180-8683-2720ee73b803

License:

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

History

Date received : 11 March 2020

Date accepted : 17 June 2020

Page count

Figures: 4, Tables: 0, Equations: 0, References: 103, Pages: 15, Words: 0

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Most cited references 94

Pathophysiology of Migraine: A Disorder of Sensory Processing.

Frequencies contributing to functional connectivity in the cerebral cortex in "resting-state" data.

Three-dimensional probabilistic anatomical cranio-cerebral correlation via the international 10-20 system oriented for transcranial functional brain mapping.

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