Increased brain activity exhibited by participants with a TBI might represent increased cerebral effort which may be manifested as cognitive fatigue. Functional MRI appears to be a potentially useful tool for understanding the neural mechanisms associated with cognitive fatigue in TBI.

The premise of this report is that functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) imaging data contain valuable physiological information that can be extracted by using analysis techniques that simultaneously consider the components of the measured hemodynamic response [i.e., levels of oxygenated, deoxygenated and total hemoglobin (oxyHb, deoxyHb and totalHb, respectively)]. We present an algorithm for examining the spatiotemporal co-variations among the Hb components, and apply it to the data obtained from a demonstrational study that employed a well-established visual stimulation paradigm: a contrast-reversing checkerboard. Our results indicate that the proposed method can identify regions of tissue that participate in the hemodynamic response to neuronal activation, but are distinct from the areas identified by conventional analyses of the oxyHb, deoxyHb and totalHb data. A discussion is provided that compares these findings to other recent studies using fNIRS techniques.