The prevalence of diabetes is increasing globally. More than 690 million cases of diabetes are expected worldwide by 2045. Continuous blood glucose monitoring is essential to control the disease and avoid long-term complications. Diabetics suffer on a daily basis with the traditional glucose monitors currently in use, which are invasive, painful, and cost-intensive. Therefore, the demand for non-invasive, painless, economical, and reliable approaches to monitor glucose levels is increasing. Since the last decades, many glucose sensing technologies have been developed. Researchers and scientists have been working on the enhancement of these technologies to achieve better results. This paper provides an updated review of some of the pioneering non-invasive optical techniques for monitoring blood glucose levels that have been proposed in the last six years, including a summary of state-of-the-art error analysis and validation techniques.

Near-infrared diffuse optical tomography (DOT) has demonstrated a great potential as an adjunct modality for differentiation of malignant and benign breast lesions and for monitoring treatment response in patients with locally advanced breast cancers. The path toward commercialization of DOT techniques depends upon the improvement of robustness and user-friendliness of this technique in hardware and software. In this study, we introduce our recently developed ultrasound-guided DOT system, which has been improved in system compactness, robustness, and user-friendliness by custom-designed electronics, automated data preprocessing, and implementation of a new two-step reconstruction algorithm. The system performance has been tested with several sets of solid and blood phantoms and the results show accuracy in reconstructed absorption coefficients as well as blood oxygen saturation. A clinical example of a breast cancer patient, who was undergoing neoadjuvant chemotherapy, is given to demonstrate the system performance.

In the last three decades, the development and steady improvement of various optical technologies at the near-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum has inspired a large number of scientists around the world to design and develop functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) systems for various medical applications. This has been driven further by the availability of new sources and detectors that support very compact and wearable system designs. In this article, we review fNIRS systems from the instrumentation point of view, discussing the associated challenges and state-of-the-art approaches. In the beginning, the fundamentals of fNIRS systems as well as light-tissue interaction at NIR are briefly introduced. After that, we present the basics of NIR systems instrumentation. Next, the recent development of continuous-wave, frequency-domain, and time-domain fNIRS systems are discussed. Finally, we provide a summary of these three modalities and an outlook into the future of fNIRS technology.

, "Diffuse optical tomography reconstruction method using ultrasound images as prior for regularization matrix," J. Biomed. Opt. Abstract. Ultrasound-guided diffuse optical tomography (DOT) is a promising imaging technique that maps hemoglobin concentrations of breast lesions to assist ultrasound (US) for cancer diagnosis and treatment monitoring. The accurate recovery of breast lesion optical properties requires an effective image reconstruction method. We introduce a reconstruction approach in which US images are encoded as prior information for regularization of the inversion matrix. The framework of this approach is based on image reconstruction package "NIRFAST." We compare this approach to the US-guided dual-zone mesh reconstruction method, which is based on Born approximation and conjugate gradient optimization developed in our laboratory. Results were evaluated using phantoms and clinical data. This method improves classification of malignant and benign lesions by increasing malignant to benign lesion absorption contrast. The results also show improvements in reconstructed lesion shapes and the spatial distribution of absorption maps.

Non-invasive glucose monitoring sensors are promising techniques in diabetes management. In particular, optical-based nearinfrared glucose sensors are label-free, compact, user-friendly, and inexpensive. They require no daily calibration and can provide continuous glucose level monitoring. However, these sensors are still in the development stage since their accuracy is still not widely accepted by medical professionals. Here, we introduce an optimized dual-channel approach for this kind of sensor where four optodes for short and long channels are employed. The long channel signal that contains useful information about the glucose level can be utilized to calculate the glucose contents in the dermis layer of the skin while the short channel is utilized to measure the interference "noise" signal originating from the epidermis layer. So, the latter can then be removed from the long channel signal. This work investigates the optimal source-detector separation (SDS) of both short and long channels for a wide range of wavelengths from 1200 nm to 1900 nm. Based on the sensitivity distributions of both dermis and epidermis layers and the signal-to-noise ratio, it is suggested that a 2 mm SDS distance with a wavelength of 1450 nm is a potential choice for the short channel. Moreover, 6 mm SDS at the wavelength of 1750 nm is the optimal choice for the long channel. This work may pave the way for further optimization of non-invasive near-infrared glucose sensors that will be widely adopted in the healthcare sector.

In this paper, we utilized functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technology to examine the hemodynamic responses in the motor cortex for two conditions, namely standing and sitting tasks. Nine subjects performed five trials of standing and sitting (SAS) tasks with both real movements and imagery thinking of SAS. A group level of statistical parametric mapping (SPM) analysis during these tasks showed bilateral activation of oxy-hemoglobin for both real movements and imagery experiments. Interestingly, the SPM analysis clearly revealed that the sitting tasks induced a higher oxy-hemoglobin level activation compared to the standing task. Remarkably, this finding is persistent across the 22 measured channels at the individual and group levels for both experiments. Furthermore, six features were extracted from pre-processed HbO signals and the performance of four different classifiers was examined in order to test the viability of using SAS tasks in future fNIRSbrain-computer interface (fNIRS-BCI) systems. In particular, two features-combination tests revealed that the signal slope with signal variance represents one of the three best two-combined features for its consistency in providing high accuracy results for both real and imagery experiments. This study shows the potential of implementing such tasks into the fNIRS-BCI system. In the future, the results of this work could pave the way towards the application of fNIRS-BCI in lower limb rehabilitation.

Synchrotron X-ray radiation (SXR) has been widely studied to explore the structure of matter. Recently, there has been an intense focus on the medical application of SXR in imaging. This review is intended to explore the latest applications of SXR in medical imaging and to shed light on the advantages and drawbacks of this modality. The article highlights the latest developments in other fields that can greatly enhance the capability and applicability of SXR. The potentials of using machine and deep learning (DL)-based methods to generate synthetic images to use in regular clinics along with the use of photon counting X-ray detectors for spectral medical imaging with SXR are also discussed.

In this study, we aimed at exploring the feasibility of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) for studying the observation and/or motor imagination of various postural tasks. Thirteen healthy adult subjects followed five trials of static and dynamic standing balance tasks, throughout three different experimental setups of action observation (AO), a combination of action observation and motor imagery (AO+MI), and motor imagery (MI). During static and dynamic standing tasks, both the AO+MI and MI experiments revealed that many channels in prefrontal or motor regions are significantly activated while the AO experiment showed almost no significant increase in activations in most of the channels. The contrast between static and dynamic standing tasks showed that with more demanding balance tasks, relative higher activation patterns were observed, particularly during AO and in AO+MI experiments in the frontopolar area. Moreover, the AO+MI experiment revealed a significant difference in premotor and supplementary motor cortices that are related to balance control. Furthermore, it has been observed that the AO+MI experiment induced relatively higher activation patterns in comparison to AO or MI alone. Remarkably, the results of this work match its counterpart from previous functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. Therefore, they may pave the way for using the fNIRS as a diagnostic tool for evaluating the performance of the non-physical balance training during the rehabilitation period of temporally immobilized patients.