A Kalman-based tomographic scheme for directly reconstructing activation levels of brain function.

In functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), the conventional indirect approaches first separately recover the spatial distribution of the changes in the optical properties at every time point, and then extract the activation levels by a time-course analysis process at every site. In the tomographic implementation of fNIRS, i.e., diffuse optical tomography (DOT), these approaches not only suffer from the ill-posedness of the optical inversions and error propagation between the two successive steps, but also fail to achieve satisfactory temporal resolution due to the requirement for a complete data set. To cope with the above adversities of the indirect approaches, we propose herein a direct approach to tomographically reconstructing the activation levels by incorporating a Kalman scheme. Dynamic simulative and phantom experiments were conducted for the performance validation of the proposed approach, demonstrating its potentials to improve the calculated images and to relax the speed limitation of the instruments.