BackgroundNear-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a non-invasive neuroimaging technique that recently has been developed to measure the changes of cerebral blood oxygenation associated with brain activities. To date, for functional brain mapping applications, there is no standard on-line method for analysing NIRS data.MethodsIn this paper, a novel on-line NIRS data analysis framework taking advantages of both the general linear model (GLM) and the Kalman estimator is devised. The Kalman estimator is used to update the GLM coefficients recursively, and one critical coefficient regarding brain activities is then passed to a t-statistical test. The t-statistical test result is used to update a topographic brain activation map. Meanwhile, a set of high-pass filters is plugged into the GLM to prevent very low-frequency noises, and an autoregressive (AR) model is used to prevent the temporal correlation caused by physiological noises in NIRS time series. A set of data recorded in finger tapping experiments is studied using the proposed framework.ResultsThe obtained results suggest that the method can effectively track the task related brain activation areas, and prevent the noise distortion in the estimation while the experiment is running. Thereby, the potential of the proposed method for real-time NIRS-based brain imaging was demonstrated.ConclusionsThis paper presents a novel on-line approach for analysing NIRS data for functional brain mapping applications. This approach demonstrates the potential of a real-time-updating topographic brain activation map.

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BackgroundThe electroencephalography (EEG) signals are known to involve the firings of neurons in the brain. The P300 wave is a high potential caused by an event-related stimulus. The detection of P300s included in the measured EEG signals is widely investigated. The difficulties in detecting them are that they are mixed with other signals generated over a large brain area and their amplitudes are very small due to the distance and resistivity differences in their transmittance.MethodsA novel real-time feature extraction method for detecting P300 waves by combining an adaptive nonlinear principal component analysis (ANPCA) and a multilayer neural network is proposed. The measured EEG signals are first filtered using a sixth-order band-pass filter with cut-off frequencies of 1 Hz and 12 Hz. The proposed ANPCA scheme consists of four steps: pre-separation, whitening, separation, and estimation. In the experiment, four different inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs) are utilized: 325 ms, 350 ms, 375 ms, and 400 ms.ResultsThe developed multi-stage principal component analysis method applied at the pre-separation step has reduced the external noises and artifacts significantly. The introduced adaptive law in the whitening step has made the subsequent algorithm in the separation step to converge fast. The separation performance index has varied from -20 dB to -33 dB due to randomness of source signals. The robustness of the ANPCA against background noises has been evaluated by comparing the separation performance indices of the ANPCA with four algorithms (NPCA, NSS-JD, JADE, and SOBI), in which the ANPCA algorithm demonstrated the shortest iteration time with performance index about 0.03. Upon this, it is asserted that the ANPCA algorithm successfully separates mixed source signals.ConclusionsThe independent components produced from the observed data using the proposed method illustrated that the extracted signals were clearly the P300 components elicited by task-related stimuli. The experiment using 350 ms ISI showed the best performance. Since the proposed method does not use down-sampling and averaging, it can be used as a viable tool for real-time clinical applications.

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