Continuous brain imaging techniques can be beneficial for the monitoring of neurological pathologies (such as epilepsy or stroke) and neuroimaging protocols involving movement. Among existing ones, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG) have the advantage of being noninvasive, nonobstructive, inexpensive, yield portable solutions, and offer complementary monitoring of electrical and local hemodynamic activities. This article presents a novel system with 128 fNIRS channels and 32 EEG channels with the potential to cover a larger fraction of the adult superficial cortex than earlier works, is integrated with 32 EEG channels, is light and battery-powered to improve portability, and can transmit data wirelessly to an interface for real-time display of electrical and hemodynamic activities. A novel fNIRS-EEG stretchable cap, two analog channels for auxiliary data (e.g., electrocardiogram), eight digital triggers for event-related protocols and an internal accelerometer for movement artifacts removal contribute to improve data acquisition quality. The system can run continuously for 24 h. Following instrumentation validation and reliability on a solid phantom, performance was evaluated on (1) 12 healthy participants during either a visual (checkerboard) task at rest or while pedalling on a stationary bicycle or a cognitive (language) task and (2) 4 patients admitted either to the epilepsy (n = 3) or stroke (n = 1) units. Data analysis confirmed expected hemodynamic variations during validation recordings and useful clinical information during in-hospital testing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a wearable wireless multichannel fNIRS-EEG monitoring system in patients with neurological conditions. Hum Brain Mapp 39:7-23, 2018. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Keywords: cerebral hemodynamics; electroencephalography; epilepsy; functional brain imaging and monitoring; limb-shaking transient ischemic attacks; portable near-infrared spectroscopy.
© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.