Near-Infrared Brain Volumetric Imaging Method: A Monte Carlo Study

The symptom of brain volumetric changes may provide significant biomarker to predict progressive dementia. The brain volumetric changes of prefrontal cortex are highly associated with many neurodegenerative diseases. Besides, brain atrophy reveals the expanded interhemispheric fissure and the concomitant increasing cerebrospinal fluid volume. Thus, the quantitative assessment of brain volumetric changes is an important consideration for clinical studies of neurodegenerative diseases. In this study, we first proposed an approach that uses near-infrared brain volumetric imaging to detect brain volumetric changes. The healthy, aged, and typical Alzheimer's disease (AD) brains were modeled with different characterization of brain volumetric changes from in vivo MRI data based on time-resolved 3-D Monte Carlo simulation. In the results, the significant difference of prefrontal cortex structure can be observed among healthy, aged, and AD brain with various source-detector separations in sagittal view. Our study shows that the near-infrared brain volumetric imaging can be an indicator of brain atrophy for clinical application of neurodegenerative diseases with patient-oriented measurement.