KEYWORDS: Brain, Visualization, Near infrared spectroscopy, Neuroimaging, Neurophotonics, Control systems, Data acquisition, Lutetium, Lithium, Visual process modeling
Significance: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the most common psychological disease in childhood. Currently, widely used neuroimaging techniques require complete body confinement and motionlessness and thus are extremely hard for brain scanning of ADHD children.
Aim: We present resting-state functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) as an imaging technique to record spontaneous brain activity in children with ADHD.
Approach: The brain functional connectivity was calculated, and the graph theoretical analysis was further applied to investigate alterations in the global and regional properties of the brain network in the patients. In addition, the relationship between brain network features and core symptoms was examined.
Results: ADHD patients exhibited significant decreases in both functional connectivity and global network efficiency. Meanwhile, the nodal efficiency in children with ADHD was also found to be altered, e.g., increase in the visual and dorsal attention networks and decrease in somatomotor and default mode networks, compared to the healthy controls. More importantly, the disrupted functional connectivity and nodal efficiency significantly correlated with dimensional ADHD scores.
Conclusions: We clearly demonstrate the feasibility and potential of fNIRS-based connectome technique in ADHD or other neurological diseases in the future.
In this study, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to examine the brain activation patterns in the occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) associated with Chinese character recognition (CCR). Eighteen healthy participants were recruited to perform a well-designed task involving three types of stimuli including real characters, pseudo characters and checkerboards. By inspecting the brain activation difference and its relationship with behavioral data, we discovered that the left hemisphere is responsible for the orthographical information processing. Meanwhile, we found that the bilateral superior temporal gyrus (STG), bilateral Brodmann's area (BA) 19 and left fusiform gyrus were involved in high-level lexical information processing such as semantic and phonological ones, indicating that the brain activities in these regions were associated with enhanced CCR performance. In addition, by examining functional brain networks, it was discovered that increased brain connectivity in the right BA 19 exhibited significant correlation with the performance of CCR. Consequently, the combination of fNIRS technique with functional network analysis paves a new avenue for an improved understanding the cognitive mechanism underlying CCR.
Although the neural basis underlying visuospatial reasoning has been widely explored by neuroimaging techniques, the brain activation patterns during naturalistic visuospatial reasoning such as tangram remains unclear. In this study, the directional functional connectivity of fronto-parietal networks during the tangram task was carefully inspected by using combined functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and conditional Granger causality analysis (GCA). Meanwhile, the causal networks during the traditional spatial reasoning task were also characterized to exhibit the differences with those during the tangram task. We discovered that the tangram task in a natural environment showed enhanced activation in the fronto-parietal regions, particularly the frontal cortex. In addition, a strong directional connectivity from the right prefrontal cortex to left angular gyrus was detected for the complex spatial reasoning condition of spatial reasoning task, whereas no effective connectivity was identified between the frontal and parietal cortices during the tangram task. Further correlation analyses showed that the behavioral performance in the spatial reasoning rather than the tangram task manifested the relationship with the connectivity between the frontal and parietal cortex. Our findings demonstrate that the tangram task measures a different aspect of the visuospatial reasoning ability which requires more trial-and-error strategies and creative thinking rather than inductive reasoning. In particular, the frontal cortex is mostly involved in tangram puzzle-solving, whereas the interaction between frontal and parietal cortices might be disrupted by the hands-on experience during the tangram task. Our study also indicates that conditional GCA combined with fNIRS neuroimaging technique is a robust tool for constructing the causal networks associated with natural visuospatial reasoning, which paves a new avenue for an improved understanding of the neural mechanism underlying tangram
Executive functions (EFs) associated with the frontal lobe are vital for goal-orientated behavior. To date, limited efforts have been made to examine the relationships among the behavior, brain activation, and topological organization of functional networks in the frontal lobe underlying various EF tasks, including inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. In this study, functional near-infrared spectroscopy neuroimaging technique was used to systematically inspect the differences in the brain activation and the topological organization of brain networks between various EF tasks in the frontal lobe. In addition, the relationships between brain activation/network properties and task performances and the relationships between brain activation and network properties were, respectively, examined for different EF tasks. Consequently, we have discovered that the nodal and global properties of the resting-state and task-evoked networks, respectively, exhibited significant correlations with the activation of various brain regions during various EF tasks. In particular, the measure that links the neural activation to the topological organization of the brain networks in the frontal lobe can serve as a synergistic indicator to examine the difference between various EF tasks, which paves a way toward a comprehensive understanding of the neural mechanism underlying EFs.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.