New cross-talk measure of near-infrared spectroscopy and its application to wavelength combination optimization.

In near-infrared spectroscopy, concentration changes in oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin are calculated from the changes in the attenuation of the measurement light. This is done by solving a linear equation based on the modified Lambert-Beer law. To solve this equation, we need to know the partial optical pathlengths in the activated region in the brain. Because they are difficult to know, a wavelength-independent constant or a wavelength-dependent total optical pathlength has been substituted for these values in actual measurements. This kind of substitution inevitably produces errors, called cross-talk, when calculating concentration changes. In this paper, we propose a new cross-talk measure for dual and triple wavelength measurements, and analyze it over various wavelength combinations. The results indicate that constant substitution is not inferior to total path-length substitution in dual wavelength measurements, and that total path-length substitution is very effective for triple wavelength measurements.