Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an emerging low-cost noninvasive neuroimaging technique that measures cortical bloodflow. While fNIRS has gained interest as a potential alternative to fMRI for use with clinical and pediatric populations, it remains unclear whether fNIRS has the necessary sensitivity to serve as a replacement for fMRI. The present study set out to examine whether fNIRS has the sensitivity to detect linear changes in activation and functional connectivity in response to cognitive load, and functional connectivity changes when transitioning from a task-free resting state to a task. Sixteen young adult subjects were scanned with a continuous-wave fNIRS system during a 10-minute resting-state scan followed by a letter n-back task with three load conditions. Five optical probes were placed over frontal and parietal cortices, covering bilateral dorsolateral PFC (dlPFC), bilateral ventrolateral PFC (vlPFC), frontopolar cortex (FP), and bilateral parietal cortex. Activation was found to scale linearly with working memory load in bilateral prefrontal cortex. Functional connectivity increased with increasing n-back loads for fronto-parietal, interhemispheric dlPFC, and local connections. Functional connectivity differed between the resting state scan and the n-back scan, with fronto-parietal connectivity greater during the n-back, and interhemispheric vlPFC connectivity greater during rest. These results demonstrate that fNIRS is sensitive to both cognitive load and state, suggesting that fNIRS is well-suited to explore the full complement of neuroimaging research questions and will serve as a viable alternative to fMRI.

Over the last two decades, the evidence has been growing that in addition to epileptic spikes high frequency oscillations (HFOs) are important biomarkers of epileptogenic tissue. New methods of artificial intelligence such as deep learning neural networks can provide additional tools for automated analysis of EEG. Here we present a Long Short-Term Memory neural network for detection of spikes, ripples and ripples-on-spikes (RonS). We used intracranial EEG (iEEG) from two independent datasets. First dataset (7 patients) was used for network training and testing. The second dataset (5 patients) was used for cross-institutional validation. 1000 events of each class (spike, RonS, ripple and baseline) were selected from the candidates initially found using a novel threshold method. Network training was performed using random selections of 50–500 events (per class) from all patients from the 1^st dataset. This ‘global’ network was then tested on other events for each patient from both datasets. The network was able to detect events with a good generalisability namely, with total accuracy and specificity for each class exceeding 90% in all cases, and sensitivity less than 86% in only two cases (82.5% for spikes in one patient and 81.9% for ripples in another patient). The deep learning networks can significantly accelerate the analysis of iEEG data and increase their diagnostic value which may improve surgical outcome in patients with localization-related intractable epilepsy.

Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a developing technology for low-cost noninvasive functional brain imaging. With multichannel optical instruments, it becomes possible to measure not only local changes in hemoglobin concentrations but also temporal correlations of those changes in different brain regions which gives an optical analog of functional connectivity traditionally measured by fMRI. We recorded hemodynamic activity during the Go-NoGo task from 11 right-handed subjects with probes placed bilaterally over prefrontal areas. Subjects were detecting animals as targets in natural scenes pressing a mouse button. Data were low-pass filtered <1 Hz and cardiac/respiration/superficial layers artifacts were removed using Independent Component Analysis. Fisher's transformed correlations of poststimulus responses (30 s) were averaged over groups of channels unilaterally in each hemisphere (intrahemispheric connectivity) and the corresponding channels between hemispheres (interhemispheric connectivity). The hemodynamic response showed task-related activation (an increase/decrease in oxygenated/deoxygenated hemoglobin, respectively) greater in the right versus left hemisphere. Intra- and interhemispheric functional connectivity was also significantly stronger during the task compared to baseline. Functional connectivity between the inferior and the middle frontal regions was significantly stronger in the right hemisphere. Our results demonstrate that optical methods can be used to detect transient changes in functional connectivity during rapid cognitive processes.