A new approach to functional near-infrared technology

The Opto-Temporal Imaging System (OTIS) system is presented that has been developed as a real-time continuous wave (CW) system that is portable, noninvasive, and can be used anywhere on the head and not just areas of exposed scalp as many existing fNIR systems are limited to. A custom LED array provides three NIR wavelengths of light that are used to compute blood volume and oxygenation over targeted areas every 30 ms (33 Hz). The OTIS system is composed of an electronics enclosure, two sensors, and a software bundle. The sensors each include an emitter and multiple detectors. The emitter emits three wavelengths of NIR light consecutively, timed by control signals from the electronics enclosure, while the detectors measure and amplify the received light signal. This detector output is returned to the electronics enclosure, where the signal is filtered, sampled, and encoded into digital transmit packets. These packets are then transmitted to an external computer, via Ethernet, and the software bundle logs the raw packet data. Oxygenation calculations are performed by the software bundle.