Method for the discrimination of superficial and deep absorption variations by time domain fNIRS

A method for the discrimination of superficial and deep absorption variations by time domain functional near infrared spectroscopy is presented. The method exploits the estimate of the photon time-dependent pathlength in different domains of the sampled medium and makes use of an approach based on time-gating of the photon distribution of time-of-flights. Validation of the method is performed in the two-layer geometry to focus on muscle and head applications. Numerical simulations varied the thickness of the upper layer, the interfiber distance, the shape of the instrument response function and the photon counts. Preliminary results from in vivo data are also shown. © 2013 Optical Society of America.