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What areas has fNIRS technology been applied?
- 20 Feb 2023
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What areas has fNIRS technology been applied?
- Updated on 20 Feb 2023
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Psychedelics
Effects of psilocybin on functional connectivity measured with fNIRS: Insights from a single-subject pilot study.
Scholkmann, F., Holper, L., Preller, K. H., & Vollenweider, F. X.
Significance: This study demonstrates that fNIRS is able to detect psilocybin-induced changes in a brain measure called resting-state functional connectivity.
Mental Health
Application of functional near-infrared spectroscopy in the healthcare industry: A review
Significance: Review of fNIRS studies of autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, epilepsy, depressive disorders, anxiety and panic disorder, schizophrenia, mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, stroke, and traumatic brain injury.
M.A. Gramlich, S.M. Neer, D.C. Beidel, C.J. Bohil, C.A. Bowers
Significance: Using fNIRS, this study indicated that combat veterans with PTSD demonstrated significant activation to a trauma-related sound compared with nonmilitary personnel and combat veterans without PTSD.
Current opinions on the present and future use of functional near-infrared spectroscopy in psychiatry
Rihui Li, Hadi Hosseini, Manish Saggar, Stephanie Christina Balters, Allan L. Reiss
Significance: Describes promising future for using fNIRS in the clinic to help diagnose and treat psychiatric disorders. Mentions Kernel Flow as an exciting development in this field.
Significance: This study showed a decline in task performance and an increase in prefrontal HbO2 signal with age, with a plateau of prefrontal activity observed for the hardest task, suggesting that a ceiling in neural resources was reached for the older pilot group.
Age-related prefrontal cortex activation in associative memory: An fNIRS pilot study
D. Talamonti, C.A. Montgomery, D. P.A. Clark, D. Bruno
Significance: fNIRS revealed differential brain activity patterns during a memory task depending on age and general cognitive performance.
Age and Vascular Burden Determinants of Cortical Hemodynamics Underlying Verbal Fluency
Sebastian Heinzel, Florian G. Metzger, Ann-Christine Ehlis, et al.
Significance: Brain responses measured by fNIRS were related to chronological age and general vascular health.
Elite Performance
Implementation of fNIRS for Monitoring Levels of Expertise and Mental Workload
Significance: Greater expertise was associated with relatively lower oxygenation (less neural activity) at low to moderate levels of taskload, but higher oxygenation and better performance at high levels of taskload. For novices, oxygenation was higher at moderate levels of taskload, but dropped precipitously at higher levels of taskload, along with performance, consistent with disengaging from the task.
Chenot Q., Lepron E., De Boissezon X., Scannella S.
Significance: The intrinsic functional brain connectivity was a significant predictor of performance at the Space Fortress game multitask but not at its monotask version, suggesting that this brain metric could be used as an intrinsic brain marker for performance prediction of a complex task achievement, but not for simple task performance.
K.L. Meidenbauer, K.W. Choe, C. Cardenas-Iniguez, T.J. Huppert, M.G. Berman
Significance: The level of brain activity as measured by fNIRS was positively correlated to performance on a difficult task, not correlated with performance on a medium difficulty task, and negatively associated with performance on an easy task, indicating that during a difficult task, higher brain activity can be helpful, but during an easy task, having a high level of brain activity may indicate that the task is too difficult.
Attention & Focus
Significance: Performance degradation for surgeons during multitasking is associated with fNIRS measurements of deactivation of prefrontal brain regions important for attentional control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility.
Hemodynamic responses on prefrontal cortex related to meditation and attentional task
D. Singh, V. S. Ashok, V. N. Kalkuni, N. Hongasandra
Significance: During meditation there were changes in brain activity distinct from changes seen during random thinking, along with improved performance on an attention task linked to the magnitude of brain changes during meditation.
Sensitivity of fNIRS to cognitive state and load
F. Fishburn, M. Norr, A. Medvedev, C. Vaidya
Significance: Brain activation measured by fNIRS was found to scale linearly with working memory task difficulty in some brain regions, and the pattern of brain activity connections varied by the participant task (resting vs. a memory task).
Quantification of Pain
Significance: This study showed that morphine blunted the fNIRS-measured pain signal in the medial prefrontal cortex and somatosensory cortex, but morphine did not change the brain response to a non-painful stimulus, indicating that fNIRS was able to accurately index perceived pain.
A Machine Learning Approach for the Identification of a Biomarker of Human Pain using fNIRS
R.R. Fernandez, X. Huang, K. Ou
Significance: This study demonstrates an objective assessment of human pain using fNIRS and ML.
Stroke & TBI
Significance: Stroke patients in the neurocritical care unit had abnormally asymmetric patterns of brain activity as measured by fNIRS.
M. Yang, Z. Yang, T. Yuan, W. Feng, P. Wang
Significance: Summary of 66 articles using fNIRS for stroke research.
Assessment of cerebrovascular dysfunction after traumatic brain injury with fMRI and fNIRS
Significance: Global cerebrovascular reactivity is significantly lower in chronic TBI patients than healthy controls, and is reliably measured by both fMRI and fNIRS, the former with better spatial and the latter with better temporal resolution.
Stress & Wellness
Significance: This study constitutes an important first successful demonstration of neurofeedback training based on stress-related large-scale brain network balance – a novel approach that has the potential to train control over the central response to stressors in real-life and could build the foundation for future clinical interventions that aim at increasing resilience. While this demonstration was with fMRI we believe it may be possible to do with fNIRS as well.
Assessment of mental stress effects on prefrontal cortical activities using canonical correlation analysis: an fNIRS-EEG study
F. Al-Shargie, T. Tang, and M. Kiguchi
Significance: This fNIRS and EEG study showed that mental stress-related brain activity is localized to a region of the prefrontal cortex which could be used to extract performance metrics of neurofeedback training in stress coping.
Assessment of flourishing levels of individuals by using resting-state fNIRS with different functional connectivity measures
Aykut Eken
Significance: Using fNIRS measurements of resting-state activity, an ML algorithm was able to classify individuals with self-reported high well-being (flourishing) and average well-being.
Effects of Daily Stress in Mental State Classification
Significance: Individual daily stress level was discriminated with signal features from fNIRS, and separate from task-induced stress. The findings of this study show the feasibility of the fNIRS-based daily stress classification and can be used in the future to design a robust mental stress management system for the assessment of daily stress in individuals.
Social Experiences
Real-life creative problem solving in teams: fNIRS based hyperscanning study
N. Mayseless, G. Hawthorne, A.L. Reiss
Significance: This study used fNIRS to measure inter-brain synchrony between interacting partners engaged in a creative design task, showing an increase in cooperation over time in association with reduction in inter-brain synchrony.
J. Hirsch, X. Zhang, J.A. Noah, Y. Ono
Significance: fNIRS signals acquired during eye-to-eye contact between partners (interactive condition) were compared to signals acquired during mutual gaze at the eyes of a picture-face (non-interactive condition), showing unique brain activation patterns for the interactive condition.
V. Reindl, C. Gerloff, W. Scharke, K. Konrad
Significance: During cooperation, parent's and child's brain activities synchronized in the dorsolateral prefrontal and frontopolar cortex (FPC), which was predictive for their cooperative performance in subsequent trials. No significant brain-to-brain synchrony was observed in the conditions: parent-child competition, stranger-child cooperation and stranger-child competition. Brain-to-brain synchrony was also related to children’s emotional regulation, and may represent an underlying neural mechanism of the emotional connection between parent and child.