A quantitative comparison of NIRS and fMRI across multiple cognitive tasks

By Xu Cui, S. Bray, Daniel M. Bryant, Gary H. Glover, Allan L. Reiss. NeuroImage, 2010

949 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is an increasingly popular technology for studying brain function. NIRS presents several advantages relative to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), such as measurement of concentration changes in both oxygenated- and deoxygenated hemoglobin, finer temporal resolution, and ease of administration, as well as disadvantages, most prominently inferior spatial resolution and decreased signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). While fMRI has become the gold standard for in vivo imaging of the human brain, in practice NIRS is a more convenient and less expensive technology than fMRI. It is therefore of interest to many researchers how NIRS compares to fMRI in studies of brain function. In the present study we scanned participants with simultaneous NIRS and fMRI on a battery of cognitive tasks, placing NIRS probes over both frontal and parietal brain regions. We performed detailed comparisons of the signals in both temporal and spatial domains. We found that NIRS signals have significantly weaker SNR, but are nonetheless often highly correlated with fMRI measurements. Both SNR and the distance between the scalp and the brain contributed to variability in the NIRS/fMRI correlations. In the spatial domain, we found that a photon path forming an ellipse between the NIRS emitter and detector correlated most strongly with the BOLD response. Taken together these findings suggest that, while NIRS can be an appropriate substitute for fMRI for studying brain activity related to cognitive tasks, care should be taken when designing studies with NIRS to ensure that: 1) the spatial resolution is adequate for answering the question of interest and 2) the design accounts for weaker SNR, especially in brain regions more distal from the scalp.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5af02f05fb63e308ff84bcd692dd19709c14c508

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

Citations in the corpus

Application of functional near-infrared spectroscopy in psychiatry (2014, background): “reliability of fNIRS data has been shown to be affected by anatomical parameters, such as scalp-to-cortex distance (SCD; Cui et al., 2011; Haeussinger et al., 2011) and peripheral hemodynamic parameters (i.”
Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy and Its Clinical Application in the Field of Neuroscience: Advances and Future Directions (2020, background): “, 2017), while others have found stronger correlations between the BOLD response and fNIRS measures of oxyhemoglobin (Cui et al., 2011).”
Overview of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (2011, background): “NIRS resolution is low (10–20 mm) and is limited predominantly by the strong scatter and attenuation of infrared photons (which also limits the depth of cortex that can be imaged within a bananashaped region connecting optodes), the modest density of optodes, and the ill-conditioned inverse problem ”
A NIRS-fMRI investigation of prefrontal cortex activity during a working memory task (2013, positive): “In a recent representative study (Cui et al., 2011), both the prefrontal and parietal regions were measured using a battery of cognitive tasks including finger tapping and N-back WM tasks.”
The physiological origin of task-evoked systemic artefacts in functional near infrared spectroscopy (2012, background): “However, the higher reliability of the Deoxy-Hb activation maps is often discussed in the literature and is also supported by the fact that Deoxy-Hb signals show higher correlations with fMRI results (Cui et al., 2011).”
Abnormal Brain Connectivity Patterns in Children with Global Developmental Delay Accompanied by Cognitive Impairment: A Resting-State EEG Study. (2025, unknown): “Studies have shown significant correlations between hemodynamic responses measured by fNIRS and blood oxygen level-dependent responses obtained by fMRI [11].”