Cortical brain imaging by adaptive filtering of NIRS signals

Abstract

This paper presents an online brain imaging framework for cognitive tasks conducted with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The measured signal at each channel is regarded as the output from a linear system with unknown coefficients. The unknown coefficients are estimated by using the recursive least squares estimation (RLSE) method. The validity of the estimated parameters is tested using the t-statistics. Contrary to the classical approach that is offline and applies the same preprocessing scheme to all channels, the proposed RLSE method for a linear model formulation provides an independent robust adaptive process for individual channels. The experiments carried out with two fNIRS instruments (continuous-wave and frequency-domain) have verified the potential of the proposed methodology which can facilitate a prompt medical diagnostics by providing real-time brain activation maps.