Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2021 Jun:18:100272.
doi: 10.1016/j.cobme.2021.100272. Epub 2021 Feb 3.

Towards Neuroscience of the Everyday World (NEW) using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

Alexander von Lühmann  1   2 , Yilei Zheng  1   3 , Antonio Ortega-Martinez  1 , Swathi Kiran  4 , David C Somers  5 , Alice Cronin-Golomb  5 , Louis N Awad  6 , Terry D Ellis  6 , David A Boas  1 , Meryem A Yücel  1
Affiliations

Towards Neuroscience of the Everyday World (NEW) using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

Alexander von Lühmann et al. Curr Opin Biomed Eng. 2021 Jun.

Abstract

Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) assesses human brain activity by noninvasively measuring changes of cerebral hemoglobin concentrations caused by modulation of neuronal activity. Recent progress in signal processing and advances in system design, such as miniaturization, wearability and system sensitivity, have strengthened fNIRS as a viable and cost-effective complement to functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), expanding the repertoire of experimental studies that can be performed by the neuroscience community. The availability of fNIRS and Electroencephalography (EEG) for routine, increasingly unconstrained, and mobile brain imaging is leading towards a new domain that we term "Neuroscience of the Everyday World" (NEW). In this light, we review recent advances in hardware, study design and signal processing, and discuss challenges and future directions towards achieving NEW.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of interests The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The figure illustrates the growth of fNIRS publications from 1993 to 2019 as assessed on October 31st 2020, and our predictions for the period 2021 to 2024. The dashed black line represents the growing trend, and the black dots indicate the prediction (2017 to 2019) in our previous paper [6], showing that real publications in the last three years match well with the prediction. We expect the total number of fNIRS papers to continue to grow in the next several years as we illustrate with the magenta bars. This graph also highlights the growth of papers published utilizing multimodal measurements or wearable fNIRS since its first implementation in 1998. These statistics were obtained from a database created by a Web of Science search with the search terms ‘fNIRS’ and ‘brain’. ‘Multimodal’ refers to synchronous measurements of fNIRS and other neuroimaging modalities. Search keywords for multimodal fNIRS studies were a combination of ‘fNIRS’ and any one of the following words: ‘multimodal’, ‘bimodal’, ‘hybrid’ or ‘EEG’. Search keywords for wearable fNIRS studies were a combination of ‘fNIRS’ and any one of the following words: ‘wearable’, ‘wireless’, ‘fiberless’ or ‘modular’.
Figure 2:
Figure 2:
The authors’ ongoing approach to implement a version of the NEW Concept. Hybrid wearable high density fNIRS-EEG instrumentation (efNIRS) combined with eye tracking (here Tobii Glasses) and cloud-based computer vision for object recognition and automatic stimulus tracking / data labeling.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Neisser U, Cognition and Reality. W.H. Freeman & Co Ltd, 1976.
    1. Ladouce S, Donaldson DI, Dudchenko PA, and Ietswaart M, “Understanding Minds in Real-World Environments: Toward a Mobile Cognition Approach,” Front. Hum. Neurosci, vol. 10, January. 2017. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Ward JA, Pinti P, Amft O, and Van Laerhoven K, “Wearables and the Brain,” IEEE Pervasive Comput, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 94–100, 2019.
    1. Huppert TJ, Hoge RD, Diamond SG, Franceschini MA, and Boas DA, “A temporal comparison of BOLD, ASL, and NIRS hemodynamic responses to motor stimuli in adult humans,” Neuroimage, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 368–382, January. 2006. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Boas DA, Elwell CE, Ferrari M, and Taga G, “Twenty years of functional near-infrared spectroscopy: introduction for the special issue.,” Neuroimage, vol. 85 Pt 1, pp. 1–5, January. 2014. - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources