Multimodal Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy in Monitoring Cerebral Haemodynamic: A Review Article

Abstract

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an optical imaging tool to study brain activities. Moreover, many researchers combined fNIRS with other modalities to gain a better understanding of the brain. This paper provides an overview of the combination of fNIRS with other imaging modalities in the detection and measurement of the cerebral hemodynamic. Cerebral haemodynamic such as the cerebral blood flow (CBF), cerebral blood volume (CBV) and cerebral blood oxygenation (CBO) are the important parameters in many neuroimaging studies. Cerebral hemodynamic had been studied by various medical imaging modalities.  Initially, Xenon enhanced Computed Tomography (Xenon CT), Computed Tomography (CT) perfusion; Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT), Positron Emission Tomography (PET) are used to measure the cerebral hemodynamic. Recently, fNIRS is used to optically observe the changes in cerebral haemodynamic during brain activities and the combination of fNIRS with other modalities also become an interest to study the relations within brain activities and the cerebral hemodynamic. Therefore, this paper provides an overview of existing multimodal fNIRS in detection of cerebral haemodynamic changes and provides an important insight on how multimodal fNIRS aid in advancing modern investigations of human brain function.       Keywords: multimodal imaging, fNIRS-fMRI, fNIRS-PET, fNIRS-EEG