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It takes two: Preliminary findings of dual-task imaging using two functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy systems in younger and older healthy adults
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Poster D3 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Erin Meier1, Gengchen Wei1, Michael Nguyen1, Edward Xu1, Grace Haskell1, Leanna Ugent1, Joshua Stefanik1, Qianqian Fang1; 1Northeastern University
Introduction: Neuroimaging wearables show promise in increasing our understanding of real-world brain function in healthy aging and disease. However, research to date falls short in validating new devices against commercially available systems and in describing brain-behavior relationships during dual-task paradigms that mirror real life, such as recounting a story while walking. In this presentation, we will describe preliminary findings in which we: 1) compare functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) data quality obtained from one commercial (NIRx) device and a new, wireless mobile optical brain imaging (MOBI) system and 2) determine differences between younger and older healthy adults in brain-behavioral relationships during dual-task fNIRS imaging. Method: Forty healthy adults (20 people ages 18-30, 20 people ages 55-75 years old) will participate. During fNIRS imaging, participants listen to and immediately retell a series of 10 ~35s stories, evenly split between Stand and Walk conditions. Participants walk at a comfortable pace or stand on a treadmill while a motion capture system measures spatiotemporal gait/postural parameters. The NIRx system includes two daisy-chained 8x8 NIRx NIRSport2 devices with 16 sources and 16 detectors. The bilaterally symmetrical 42-channel montage covers several regions of interest (ROIs), including rostrolateral (RLPFC) and dorsolateral (DLPFC) prefrontal cortices, premotor (PMC) and primary motor (M1) cortices, the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), mid to posterior superior and middle temporal gyri (mMTG, pMTG, mSTG, pSTG), and supramarginal gyrus (SMG). A series of flexible diamond-shaped circuits containing source/detector pairs comprise the MOBI; the optode arrangement of the MOBI mirrors the NIRx montage. For aim #1, data quality will be assessed using the QT-NIRS Toolbox (Hernandez & Pollonini, 2020). Channels will be flagged as bad if scalp-coupling and peak spectral power indices fall below the standard thresholds for more than 30% of data acquisition windows. For aim #2, activity within ROIs will be extracted for the contrasts WalkListen>StandListen and WalkRetell>StandRetell. Story comprehension accuracy and discourse production composite measures reflecting microlinguistic (e.g., proportion of nouns, verbs, articles) and macrolinguistic (e.g., global coherence, number of main ideas) skills will be calculated for Walk and Stand conditions. Gait will be measured by the peak force of the vertical ground reaction force. LASSO regressions will be used to identify activity within ROIs for the contrasts of interest that predict the Walk vs. Stand behavioral differences during story listen and retell. Preliminary Results: Thus far, data from 10 individuals (9 younger, 1 older) have been obtained with the NIRx system and processed using Homer3 (Huppert et al., 2009). Across the group level, activity was observed in the left anterior superior frontal gyrus, portions of bilateral DLPFC, LIFG-pars triangularis, bilateral PMC and ventral M1, bilateral mMTG, and LmSTG for WalkListen>StandListen. For WalkRetell>StandRetell, activity was noted in portions of bilateral DLPFC, PMC, SMG, and LmMTG. Discussion: This study is motivated by the need to expand understanding of aging behavior and brain function during naturalistic language contexts. During the sandbox presentation, additional data will be presented and feedback from attendees about crucial methodological concerns (e.g., motion correction techniques) will be elicited.
Topic Areas: Language Production, Methods