Methodology development for simultaneous diffuse optical tomography and magnetic resonance imaging in functional human brain mapping.

We present an integrated methodology for human brain mapping by simultaneous BOLD fMRI and NIR imaging. This methodology consists of three innovative components: the construction of MRI-compatible optical probes that can be affixed to any part of the human head inside a standard MRI head-coil with minimal MR image distortion, the accurate determination of optode positions on the head from MR images, and the application of a perturbation approach and Monte Carlo method to compute the integral kernel of the Born solution to the diffusion equation for baseline optical properties. This integrated approach has been used to demonstrate promising capabilities for studying functional hemodynamic activation in human visual cortex by simultaneous fMRI and NIR tomography.