NIRS-Based Cortical Activation Analysis by Temporal Cross Correlation

Abstract

In this study we present a method of signal processing to determine dominant channels in near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). To compare measuring channels and identify delays between them, cross correlation is computed. Furthermore, to find out possible dominant channels, a visual inspection was performed. The outcomes demonstrated that the visual inspection exhibited evoked-related activations in the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) after stimulation which is consistent with comparable studies and the cross correlation study discovered dominant channels on both cerebral hemispheres. The analysis also showed a relationship between dominant channels and adjacent channels. For that reason, our results present a new method to identify dominant regions in the cerebral cortex using near-infrared spectroscopy. These findings have also implications in the decrease of channels by eliminating irrelevant channels for the experiment.