CoMind R1: a time-resolved interferometric optical neuromonitoring system for pulsatile cerebral blood flow...

Continuous, noninvasive monitoring of cerebral blood flow (CBF) at the bedside is a critical unmet clinical need and a long-standing goal of biomedical optics. Despite extensive development, no optical measurement of CBF has achieved routine clinical use.

We aim to demonstrate and validate CoMind R1, a time-resolved interferometric neuromonitoring system designed to noninvasively measure CBF at pulsatile rates.

CoMind R1 integrates numerous advances, including a high-power, linearly swept 1064 nm laser, multimode collection, parallelized detection, and real-time processing. Performance is evaluated with homogeneous and dynamic bi-layer phantoms and in vivo studies of adults at rest and during visual stimulation.

CoMind R1 achieves an instrument response function width of 120 ps and exhibits no significant drift over 24 h. In vivo data from 25 adults show consistent pulsatile blood flow waveforms at times-of-flight averaging 1.2 ns, exceeding the prior art. Visual stimulation produces significant, time-of-flight-dependent hyperaemic responses, demonstrating brain sensitivity and selectivity.

CoMind R1 consistently achieves time-of-flight resolved measurements of pulsatile blood flow at the late times-of-flight necessary to ensure a brain-dominated signal in the typical adult. CoMind R1 thus provides cerebral sensitivity and tissue specificity in a scalable, cost-effective architecture and advances optical monitoring of CBF toward clinical translation.