A novel analysis method for near infrared spectroscopy based on Hilbert-Huang transform

Near Infrared Imager (NIRI) has been widely used to access the brain functional activity non-invasively. We use a portable, multi-channel and continuous-wave NIR topography instrument to measure the concentration changes of each hemoglobin species and map cerebral cortex functional activation. By extracting some essential features from the BOLD signals, optical tomography is able to be a new way of neuropsychological studies. Fourier spectral analysis provides a common framework for examining the distribution of global energy in the frequency domain. However, this method assumes that the signal should be stationary, which limits its application in non-stationary system. The hemoglobin species concentration changes are of such kind. In this work we develop a new signal processing method using Hilbert-Huang transform to perform spectral analysis of the functional NIRI signals. Compared with wavelet based multi-resolution analysis (MRA), we demonstrated the extraction of task related signal for observation of activation in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in vision stimulation experiment. This method provides a new analysis tool for functional NIRI signals. Our experimental results show that the proposed approach provides the unique method for reconstructing target signal without losing original information and enables us to understand the episode of functional NIRI more precisely.