TY - JOUR
T1 - Isolating the effects of surface vasculature in infant neuroimaging using short-distance optical channels
T2 - A combination of local and global effects
AU - Emberson, Lauren L.
AU - Crosswhite, Stephen L.
AU - Goodwin, James R.
AU - Berger, Andrew J.
AU - Aslin, Richard N.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).
PY - 2016/7/1
Y1 - 2016/7/1
N2 - Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) records hemodynamic changes in the cortex arising from neurovascular coupling. However, (noninvasive) fNIRS recordings also record surface vascular signals arising from noncortical sources (e.g., in the skull, skin, dura, and other tissues located between the sensors and the brain). A current and important focus in the fNIRS community is determining how to remove these noncortical vascular signals to reduce noise and to prevent researchers from erroneously attributing responses to cortical sources. The current study is the first to test a popular method for removing signals from the surface vasculature (removing short, 1 cm, channel recordings from long, 3 cm, channel recordings) in human infants, a population frequently studied using fNIRS. We find evidence that this method does remove surface vasculature signals and indicates the presence of both local and global surface vasculature signals. However, we do not find that the removal of this information changes the statistical inferences drawn from the data. This latter result not only questions the importance of removing surface vasculature responses for empiricists employing this method, but also calls for future research using other tasks (e.g., ones with a weaker initial result) with this population and possibly additional methods for removing signals arising from the surface vasculature in infants.
AB - Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) records hemodynamic changes in the cortex arising from neurovascular coupling. However, (noninvasive) fNIRS recordings also record surface vascular signals arising from noncortical sources (e.g., in the skull, skin, dura, and other tissues located between the sensors and the brain). A current and important focus in the fNIRS community is determining how to remove these noncortical vascular signals to reduce noise and to prevent researchers from erroneously attributing responses to cortical sources. The current study is the first to test a popular method for removing signals from the surface vasculature (removing short, 1 cm, channel recordings from long, 3 cm, channel recordings) in human infants, a population frequently studied using fNIRS. We find evidence that this method does remove surface vasculature signals and indicates the presence of both local and global surface vasculature signals. However, we do not find that the removal of this information changes the statistical inferences drawn from the data. This latter result not only questions the importance of removing surface vasculature responses for empiricists employing this method, but also calls for future research using other tasks (e.g., ones with a weaker initial result) with this population and possibly additional methods for removing signals arising from the surface vasculature in infants.
KW - functional near-infrared spectroscopy
KW - infant
KW - neurovascular
KW - short channel
KW - surface vasculature
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U2 - 10.1117/1.NPh.3.3.031406
DO - 10.1117/1.NPh.3.3.031406
M3 - Article
C2 - 27158631
AN - SCOPUS:84979053819
SN - 2329-423X
VL - 3
JO - Neurophotonics
JF - Neurophotonics
IS - 3
M1 - 031406
ER -