The use of near-infrared spectroscopy in the study of typical and atypical development

Abstract

The use of functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) has grown exponentially over the past decade, particularly among investigators interested in early brain development. The use of this neuroimaging technique has begun to shed light on the development of a variety of sensory, perceptual, linguistic, and social-cognitive functions. Rather than cast a wide net, in this paper we first discuss typical development, focusing on joint attention, face processing, language, and sensorimotor development. We then turn our attention to infants and children whose development has been compromised or who are at risk for atypical development. We conclude our review by critiquing some of the methodological issues that have plagued the extant literature as well as offer suggestions for future research.

Reduced interhemispheric functional connectivity of children with autism spectrum disorder: evidence from functional near infrared spectroscopy studies

“…As we have mentioned in the introductions, the temporal regions may be involved in the sensation in auditory, processing of word, and mentalizing network, where ASD children have functional and anatomical difference from TD children [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. These results provide the evidence for intrinsic hemodynamic difference between ASD and TD children in temporal cortex, suggesting fNIRS is a much cheaper and yet effective technique to detect the atypical neural activity of awoken children with ASD or other developmental disorder of the brain [9]. However, in order to test the feasibility of fNIRS in diagnosis and assessment on ASD, larger sample size and more specific assessment of symptoms will be needed.…”

“…We cut and removed the motion segment from the data. Secondly, in order to remove possible physiological noise and signals beyond our study, a band pass filtered between 0.009 and 0.08 Hz [6][7][8][9] was used. Thirdly, the global signal, which was estimated by averaging the time series over all channels, was removed by linear regression [41].…”

“…It also provides non-invasive and portable imaging environment which could be easily applied to clinical populations, children and neonates [6][7][8], especially on children with neurological disorder. So far, fNIRS has been applied to children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), epilepsy, speech and language delay, preterm birth/early brain injury, ASD and infant at risk of ASD (for a review, see [9]), showing that fNIRS can be an effective tool to reveal the biological deficits underlying cognitive dysfunction of atypically developed brain and provide new perception for early diagnosis, assessment and treatment for the symptoms. fNIRS could also cover the whole brain to measure two or more regions of cerebral cortex simultaneously and thus provides an effective way to measure the functional connectivity of different brain cortices.…”

Neuroticism and conscientiousness respectively positively and negatively correlated with the network characteristic path length in dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex: A resting‐state fNIRS study

“…The mean K represents the network density, in which the network connections are sparse when the average node degree is small. Meanwhile, functional near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a noninvasive and affordable neuroimaging technique (Ehlis, Schneider, Dresler, & Fallgatter, 2014; Ferrari & Quaresima, 2012; Vanderwert & Nelson, 2014), which utilize the near‐infrared light (wavelengths between 680–950 nm) to inspect the brain activation by measuring the concentration changes of oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) and deoxygenated hemoglobin (HbR) (Ferrari & Quaresima, 2012; Jobsis, 1977; Villringer & Chance, 1997). fNIRS studies have been conducted to reveal the neural mechanisms underlying various cognitive tasks (He, Wang, Li, & Yuan, 2017; Lu, Wang, Zhang, Chen, & Yuan, 2017; Wang, Lu, Hu, Zhang, & Yuan, 2018).…”

Preliminary Study of Gender-Based Brain Lateralization Using Multi-Channel Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

“…This location has proved to be appropriate for neurocognitive studies and has been useful in studying cognitive development in young children. [20]. Careful consideration was taken by the administrator to ensure good contact between the probe and skin, and that the probe was clear of hair.…”