Portable Diffuse Optical Tomography for Three-Dimensional Functional Neuroimaging in the Hospital

Functional neuroimaging studies of neuropsychiatric disorders and cognitive impairment are commonly conducted in the clinic setting but less so in the acutely medically ill while hospitalized. This is largely due to technical and logistical limitations, given the lack of portable devices with high spatial and temporal resolutions. This exploratory study reports on the development and implementation of a novel diffuse optical tomography (DOT) system that can be employed for bedside three-dimensional functional neuroimaging. To test this portable DOT system, our protocol included a task-based sequence involving the Months Backwards Test with imaging centered on the bilateral prefrontal cortex. Fifteen subjects were recruited from intensive care units and the general wards of a single tertiary academic hospital and included in our final analysis. Volumetric hemoglobin analyses of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) were reliably captured in all our subjects. The peak value was calculated to be 3.36 mu M and 0.74 mu M for oxygenated-hemoglobin (HbO) and total-hemoglobin (HbT) (p < 0.042, [HbT]), respectively. The standard error was calculated to be 4.58 uM and 3.68 uM for (HbO) and (HbT). We additionally developed a seed-based correlation analysis to demonstrate the capability of DOT in studying functional connectivity. The right DLPFC was found to be moderately associated with the left DLPFC in all our subjects (r = 0.656). The DMPFC was observed to be associated with the left DLPFC but less so (r = 0.273) at the group level. Overall, the contribution of left-to-right DLPFC connectivity was significantly higher than left DLPFC to DMPFC in our group (p = 0.012). Future studies should investigate the potential of such a DOT system in the research of neuropsychiatric and neurocognitive disorders within the hospital to study different types of mechanisms, pathophysiology, and interventions that occur acutely and can advance our knowledge of these disorders.