Monte Carlo study for physiological interference reduction in near-infrared spectroscopy based on empirical mode decomposition

Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) can be used as the basis of non-invasive neuroimaging that may allow the measurement of haemodynamic changes in the human brain evoked by applied stimuli. Since this technique is very sensitive, physiological interference arising from the cardiac cycle and breathing can significantly affect the signal quality. Such interference is difficult to remove by conventional techniques because it occurs not only in the extracerebral layer but also in the brain tissue itself. Previous work on this problem employing temporal filtering, spatial filtering, and adaptive filtering have exhibited good performance for recovering brain activity data in evoked response studies. However, in this study, we present a time-frequency adaptive method for physiological interference reduction based on the combination of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and Hilbert spectral analysis (HSA). Monte Carlo simulations based on a five-layered slab model of a human adult head were implemented to evaluate our methodology. We applied an EMD algorithm to decompose the NIRS time series derived from Monte Carlo simulations into a series of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). In order to identify the IMFs associated with symmetric interference, the extracted components were then Hilbert transformed from which the instantaneous frequencies could be acquired. By reconstructing the NIRS signal by properly selecting IMFs, we determined that the evoked brain response is effectively filtered out with even higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The results obtained demonstrated that EMD, combined with HSA, can effectively separate, identify and remove the contamination from the evoked brain response obtained with NIRS using a simple single source-detector pair.