Investigation of human visual cortex responses to flickering light using functional near infrared spectroscopy and constrained ICA

The human visual sensitivity to the flickering light has been under investigation for decades. The finding of research in this area can contribute to the understanding of human visual system mechanism and visual disorders, and establishing diagnosis and treatment of diseases. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of the flickering light to the visual cortex by monitoring the hemodynamic responses of the brain with the functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) method. Since the acquired fNIRS signals are affected by physiological factors and measurement artifacts, constrained independent component analysis (cICA) was applied to extract the actual fNIRS responses from the obtained data. The experimental results revealed significant changes (p < 0.0001) of the hemodynamic responses of the visual cortex from the baseline when the flickering stimulation was activated. With the uses of cICA, the contrast to noise ratio (CNR), reflecting the contrast of hemodynamic concentration between rest and task, became larger. This indicated the improvement of the fNIRS signals when the noise was eliminated. In subsequent studies, statistical analysis was used to infer the correlation between the fNIRS signals and the visual stimulus. We found that there was a slight decrease of the oxygenated hemoglobin concentration (about 5.69%) over four frequencies when the modulation increased. However, the variations of oxy and deoxy-hemoglobin were not statistically significant.