fNIRS can robustly measure brain activity during memory encoding and retrieval in healthy subjects

Abstract

Early intervention in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) requires novel biomarkers that can capture changes in brain activity at an early stage. Current AD biomarkers are expensive and/or invasive and therefore unsuitable for use as screening tools, but a non-invasive, inexpensive, easily accessible screening method could be useful in both clinical and research settings. Prior studies suggest that especially paired-associate learning tasks may be useful in detecting the earliest memory impairment in AD. Here, we investigated the utility of functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy in measuring brain activity from prefrontal, parietal and temporal cortices of healthy adults (n = 19) during memory encoding and retrieval under a face-name paired-associate learning task. Our findings demonstrate that encoding of novel face-name pairs compared to baseline as well as compared to repeated face-name pairs resulted in significant activation in left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex while recalling resulted in activation in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex bilaterally. Moreover, brain response to recalling was significantly higher than encoding in medial, superior and middle frontal cortices for novel faces. Overall, this study shows that fNIRS can reliably measure cortical brain activation during a face-name paired-associate learning task. Future work will include similar measurements in populations with progressing memory deficits.

Cortical Activation During Shoulder and Finger Movements in Healthy Adults: A Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) Study

“…Using the fOLD toolbox, a list of the selected fNIRS channels and corresponding Brodmann’s areas were then created for ease of comparison with fMRI literature ( Table 1 ). The probe contained 16 sources, 15 long separation detectors (approximately 3 cm distance from the source), and 8 short separation detectors (approximately 8 mm distance from each source; Brigadoi and Cooper, 2015 ; Yücel et al, 2015 ; Jahani et al, 2017 ; Nemani et al, 2018 ). This configuration resulted in a total of 54 channels in which 46 are long and 8 are short separation source-detector pairs ( Figure 1A ).…”

Detection of Mild Cognitive Impairment Using Convolutional Neural Network: Temporal-Feature Maps of Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

“…Traditionally, the research studies compared the hemodynamic response of a patient with that of healthy control (HC) and determined neuroanatomical or neurofunctional differences at the group level. Most AD/MCI detection studies typically employed the HbO/ HbR (Jahani et al, 2017;Perpetuini et al, 2017;Vermeij et al, 2017;Katzorke et al, 2018;Yoon et al, 2019) and relative temporal features such as the mean value, slope value, number of active channels, peak location, skewness, and kurtosis (Yap et al, 2017;Li et al, 2018a), and they determined the significant differences for comparison. The straightforwardness and interpretability of this methodology has led to considerable advances in our comprehension of the neurological disorders.…”

Current and future functional imaging techniques for post-traumatic stress disorder

“…5(a) (top) shows the designed probe used for the study and the points corresponding to the prefrontal cortex. 101 The results revealed that novel face encoding required activation of le inferior frontal cortex and inactivation of medial-to-superior frontal cortices which is shown to be signicant from the color bar as shown in Fig. 5(a) (bottom le).…”