fNIRS-Based Clinical Assessment of ADHD Children

Abstract

While a growing body of neurocognitive research has explored the neural substrates associated with attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD), an objective biomarker for diagnosis has not been established. The advent of functional near-infrared spectros-copy (fNIRS), which is a noninvasive and unrestrictive method of functional neuroimag-ing, raised the possibility of introducing functional neuroimaging diagnosis for young ADHD children. In search of a stable and clinically applicable biological marker, here in this chapter, we first discuss a plausible solution to enable the objective monitoring of the acute effects of ADHD medications at the group level. Subsequently, we discuss our suc-cessful visualization of differential neural substrates between ADHD and healthy control children for inhibitory control at the individual level, which reached an optimized clas-sification parameter with a value of 85% and a sensitivity of 90%. These findings led us to postulate that fNIRS-based examination would allow the identification of an objective neuro-functional biomarker to diagnose and determine the appropriate treatment for ADHD children. We believe that such a novel technical application would evoke wide interest from neuroimaging researchers.