The objective of the present work is to evaluate feasibility of deploying a High-Density Diffuse Optical Tomography (HD-DOT) instrument to a field setting to measure the effects of early life stressors on brain development. This goal was accomplished by imaging a cohort of typical and malnourished children in Cali, Colombia. Feasibility of performing brain imaging in this population using HD-DOT was assessed by replicating known brain responses during both tasks and rest.
A total of 22 participants were enrolled in the study (10 male; average age 107.2 months; age range 97-118 months). Participants completed a passive word listening task, and participants were also imaged as they rested quietly for 5 minutes while viewing a movie. Data acquisition was performed using a custom field-ready HD-DOT system with a small footprint optimized for field use. This continuous-wave system consisted of a 30 source by 48 detector array, (S-D separations of 1.3, 2.9, and 3.9 cm; first through third nearest neighbor measurements), sampled at a 10 Hz frame rate. Sources consisted of LEDs illuminating at 750 and 850 nm.
The passive word listening task revealed activations in the superior temporal gyrus, demonstrating sufficient data quality and sensitivity to known auditory language processing regions. Functional connectivity (FC) was measured using data collected during passive movie viewing and reveals sensitivity to at least two previously published functional networks. The results of this work confirm feasibility of performing neuroimaging in low-resource settings with HD-DOT. Future work will identify differences in brain function between the two populations.
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