Wavelet packet entropy based brain activation mapping using near infrared spectroscopy

Near-infrared spectorscopy (NIRS) is a noninvasive neuroimaging technique that recently has been developed to measure the changes of cerebral blood oxygenation associated with brain activities. Conventional NIRS data analysis methods for brain mapping application normally consist of two stages, a preprocessing stage for noise removal followed by a mapping stage. This paper describes a wavelet packet entropy based brain mapping method for NIRS data. The proposed method can skip the preprocessing stage but successfully identify the task related active brain area. Thereby, simplifying the NIRS data analysis process.