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Near infrared spectroscopy : novel signal processing methods and applications

University of British Columbia

Oxygen is a critical component in living organisms and its concentration in tissue is an important parameter indicative of tissue metabolism, level of activity and health condition. As a result, measuring oxygen concentration in the tissue is essential in many clinical and research applications. Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) is a non invasive method of measuring tissue oxygenation using diffusion of light in the tissue. NIRS as a safe, non invasive and low cost monitoring technology has been used in a wide range of applications including monitoring muscle and brain oxygenation, brain computer interface and rehabilitation. The motivation for this thesis has been to develop new signal processing methods and to investigate potential new applications for NIRS. One major characteristic of NIRS is its sensitivity to movement of the target tissue during the measurement. The effects of movements, known as motion artifacts, have limited clinical applications of NIRS in ambulant patients as well as experimental applications of NIRS monitoring in areas such as exercise science and sports medicine. In this thesis, we present a new method of reducing the effect of motion artifacts on NIRS signal using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). One of the areas of application which can significantly benefit from reduction of motion artifacts is NIRS-based wearable sensors. In particular, a potential and unexplored application of NIRS is providing a monitoring method for people with bladder control problems, which occurs in a variety of conditions including spinal cord injury and stroke. We investigate the application of NIRS for detection of bladder filling to capacity using a wearable wireless monitoring sensor which can be used to warn the subject once the bladder content reaches a predefined percentage of the full capacity. NIRS can be used as a functional neuroimaging method to identify brain activations during practice of a motor/cognitive task. One important question in this field is how the activated brain areas are interconnected. We thus investigate the use of phase information in NIRS channels to identify cortical connections and in particular, show the applicability of this approach in identifying language network in human infants.

Text

2013-10-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/45353

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/