Optimal quantitation of the cerebral hemodynamic response in functional near-infrared spectroscopy

We have compared cerebral hemodynamic changes measured by near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) with simultaneously acquired BOLD fMRI signals during breath hold challenge in humans. The oxy- and deoxyhemoglobin concentration changes were obtained from the same broadband NIRS data using four different quantitation methods. One method used only two wavelengths (690 nm and 830 nm), and three other methods used broadband data with different spectral fitting algorithms. We found that the broadband techniques employing spectral derivatives were significantly superior to the multi-wavelength methods in terms of the correlation with the BOLD signals. In two cases out of six we found that the time courses of the deoxyhemoglobin changes produced by the two-wavelength method were qualitatively inconsistent with the BOLD fMRI signals.