Assessment of Brain Function in Patients With Cognitive Impairment Based on fNIRS and Gait Analysis

Zehua Wang; Ke Ren; Deyu Li; Zeping Lv; Xiang Li; Xiaoli He; Daifa Wang; Wenyu Jiang

doi:10.3389/fnagi.2022.799732

Assessment of Brain Function in Patients With Cognitive Impairment Based on fNIRS and Gait Analysis

Front Aging Neurosci. 2022 May 24:14:799732. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2022.799732. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Zehua Wang¹, Ke Ren¹, Deyu Li¹, Zeping Lv², Xiang Li³, Xiaoli He⁴, Daifa Wang¹, Wenyu Jiang⁵

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Biomechanics and Mechanobiology, Ministry of Education, Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Biomedical Engineering, School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China.
² National Research Center for Rehabilitation Technical Aids, Beijing, China.
³ Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shenzhen, China.
⁴ Ningxia University, Yinchuan, China.
⁵ Jiangbin Hospital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Nanning, China.

Abstract

Background: Early detection of mild cognitive impairment is crucial in the prevention of Alzheimer's disease (AD). This study aims to explore the changes in gait and brain co-functional connectivity between cognitively healthy and cognitively impaired groups under dual-task walking through the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and gait analysis devices.

Method: This study used fNIRS device and gait analysis devices to collect the data of 54 older adults. According to the Mini-mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) scales, the older adults were cognitively healthy (control group) and cognitively impaired (experimental group), of which 38 were in the control group and 16 were in the experimental group. The experiment was divided into a total of three sets of task experiments: a walking-only experiment, a dual-task walking-easy (DTW-easy) experiment, and a dual-task walking-difficult (DTW-difficult) experiment.

Main result: For the cognitively impaired and cognitively healthy populations, there were no significant differences in overall functional connectivity, region of interest (ROI) connection strength, and gait performance during single-task walking between the two groups.Whereas the performances of DTW differed significantly from the single-task walking in terms of between-group variability of functional connectivity strength change values, and ROI connection strength change values in relation to the dual-task cost of gait. Finally, the cognitively impaired group was significantly more affected by DTW-difficult tasks than the cognitively healthy group.

Conclusion: This study provides a new approach to assist in the diagnosis of people with cognitive impairment and provides a new research pathway for the identification of cognitive impairment.

Keywords: brain functional connectivity; cognitive impairment; dual-task walking; fNIRS; gait analysis.