Hierarchical Bayesian Model for Diffuse Optical Tomography of the Human Brain: Human Experimental Study

Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) is an emerging technology for improving the spatial resolution of conventional multi-channel near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). The hemodynamics changes in two distinct anatomical layers, the scalp and the cortex, are known as the main contributor of NIRS measurement. Although any DOT algorithm has the ability to reconstruct scalp and cortical hemodynamics changes in their respective layers, no DOT algorithm has used a model characterizing the distinct nature of scalp and cortical hemodynamics changes to achieve accurate separation. Previously, we have proposed a hierarchical Bayesian model for DOT in which distinct prior distributions for the scalp and the cortical hemodynamics changes are assumed and then verified the reconstruction performance with a phantom experiment and a computer simulation of a real human head model (Shimokawa et al. 2013, Biomedical Optical Express). Here, we investigate the reconstruction accuracy of the proposed algorithm using human experimental data for the first time. We measured the brain activities of a single subject during a finger extension task with NIRS and fMRI. Our DOT reconstruction was compared with the fMRI localization results. Consequently, a remarkable consistency between fMRI and our DOT reconstruction was observed both in the spatial and temporal patterns. By extending the advantages of NIRS such as low running cost and portability with our DOT method, it might be possible to advance brain research in a real environment, which cannot be done with fMRI.