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Yücel, Meryem A.

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Yücel

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Meryem A.

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Yücel, Meryem A.

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    fNIRS can robustly measure brain activity during memory encoding and retrieval in healthy subjects
    (Nature Publishing Group UK, 2017) Jahani, Sahar; Fantana, Antoniu L.; Harper, David; Ellison, James M.; Boas, David; Forester, Brent P.; Yücel, Meryem A.
    Early intervention in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) requires novel biomarkers that can capture changes in brain activity at an early stage. Current AD biomarkers are expensive and/or invasive and therefore unsuitable for use as screening tools, but a non-invasive, inexpensive, easily accessible screening method could be useful in both clinical and research settings. Prior studies suggest that especially paired-associate learning tasks may be useful in detecting the earliest memory impairment in AD. Here, we investigated the utility of functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy in measuring brain activity from prefrontal, parietal and temporal cortices of healthy adults (n = 19) during memory encoding and retrieval under a face-name paired-associate learning task. Our findings demonstrate that encoding of novel face-name pairs compared to baseline as well as compared to repeated face-name pairs resulted in significant activation in left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex while recalling resulted in activation in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex bilaterally. Moreover, brain response to recalling was significantly higher than encoding in medial, superior and middle frontal cortices for novel faces. Overall, this study shows that fNIRS can reliably measure cortical brain activation during a face-name paired-associate learning task. Future work will include similar measurements in populations with progressing memory deficits.
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    Frontal Lobe Hemodynamic Responses to Painful Stimulation: A Potential Brain Marker of Nociception
    (Public Library of Science, 2016) Aasted, Christopher M.; Yücel, Meryem A.; Steele, Sarah C.; Peng, Ke; Boas, David; Becerra, Lino; Borsook, David
    The purpose of this study was to use functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine patterns of both activation and deactivation that occur in the frontal lobe in response to noxious stimuli. The frontal lobe was selected because it has been shown to be activated by noxious stimuli in functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. The brain region is located behind the forehead which is devoid of hair, providing a relative ease of placement for fNIRS probes on this area of the head. Based on functional magnetic resonance imaging studies showing blood-oxygenation-level dependent changes in the frontal lobes, we evaluated functional near-infrared spectroscopy measures in response to two levels of electrical pain in awake, healthy human subjects (n = 10; male = 10). Each subject underwent two recording sessions separated by a 30-minute resting period. Data collected from 7 subjects were analyzed, containing a total of 38/36 low/high intensity pain stimuli for the first recording session and 27/31 pain stimuli for the second session. Our results show that there is a robust and significant deactivation in sections of the frontal cortices. Further development and definition of the specificity and sensitivity of the approach may provide an objective measure of nociceptive activity in the brain that can be easily applied in the surgical setting.
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    TARGETED PRINCIPLE COMPONENT ANALYSIS: A NEW MOTION ARTIFACT CORRECTION APPROACH FOR NEAR-INFRARED SPECTROSCOPY
    (2014) Yücel, Meryem A.; Selb, Juliette J; COOPER, ROBERT J.; Boas, David
    As near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) broadens its application area to different age and disease groups, motion artifacts in the NIRS signal due to subject movement is becoming an important challenge. Motion artifacts generally produce signal fluctuations that are larger than physiological NIRS signals, thus it is crucial to correct for them before obtaining an estimate of stimulus evoked hemodynamic responses. There are various methods for correction such as principle component analysis (PCA), wavelet-based filtering and spline interpolation. Here, we introduce a new approach to motion artifact correction, targeted principle component analysis (tPCA), which incorporates a PCA filter only on the segments of data identified as motion artifacts. It is expected that this will overcome the issues of filtering desired signals that plagues standard PCA filtering of entire data sets. We compared the new approach with the most effective motion artifact correction algorithms on a set of data acquired simultaneously with a collodion-fixed probe (low motion artifact content) and a standard Velcro probe (high motion artifact content). Our results show that tPCA gives statistically better results in recovering hemodynamic response function (HRF) as compared to wavelet-based filtering and spline interpolation for the Velcro probe. It results in a significant reduction in mean-squared error (MSE) and significant enhancement in Pearson’s correlation coefficient to the true HRF. The collodion-fixed fiber probe with no motion correction performed better than the Velcro probe corrected for motion artifacts in terms of MSE and Pearson’s correlation coefficient. Thus, if the experimental study permits, the use of a collodion-fixed fiber probe may be desirable. If the use of a collodion-fixed probe is not feasible, then we suggest the use of tPCA in the processing of motion artifact contaminated data.
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    Capturing Pain in the Cortex during General Anesthesia: Near Infrared Spectroscopy Measures in Patients Undergoing Catheter Ablation of Arrhythmias
    (Public Library of Science, 2016) Kussman, Barry; Aasted, Christopher M.; Yücel, Meryem A.; Steele, Sarah C.; Alexander, Mark; Boas, David; Borsook, David; Becerra, Lino
    The predictability of pain makes surgery an ideal model for the study of pain and the development of strategies for analgesia and reduction of perioperative pain. As functional near-infrared spectroscopy reproduces the known functional magnetic resonance imaging activations in response to a painful stimulus, we evaluated the feasibility of functional near-infrared spectroscopy to measure cortical responses to noxious stimulation during general anesthesia. A multichannel continuous wave near-infrared imager was used to measure somatosensory and frontal cortical activation in patients undergoing catheter ablation of arrhythmias under general anesthesia. Anesthetic technique was standardized and intraoperative NIRS signals recorded continuously with markers placed in the data set for the timing and duration of each cardiac ablation event. Frontal cortical signals only were suitable for analysis in five of eight patients studied (mean age 14 ± 1 years, weight 66.7 ± 17.6 kg, 2 males). Thirty ablative lesions were recorded for the five patients. Radiofrequency or cryoablation was temporally associated with a hemodynamic response function in the frontal cortex characterized by a significant decrease in oxyhemoglobin concentration (paired t-test, p<0.05) with the nadir occurring in the period 4 to 6 seconds after application of the ablative lesion. Cortical signals produced by catheter ablation of arrhythmias in patients under general anesthesia mirrored those seen with noxious stimulation in awake, healthy volunteers, during sedation for colonoscopy, and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging activations in response to pain. This study demonstrates the feasibility and potential utility of functional near-infrared spectroscopy as an objective measure of cortical activation under general anesthesia.
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    Specificity of Hemodynamic Brain Responses to Painful Stimuli: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study
    (Nature Publishing Group, 2015) Yücel, Meryem A.; Aasted, Christopher M.; Petkov, Mihayl P.; Borsook, David; Boas, David; Becerra, Lino
    Assessing pain in individuals not able to communicate (e.g. infants, under surgery, or following stroke) is difficult due to the lack of non-verbal objective measures of pain. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) being a portable, non-invasive and inexpensive method of monitoring cerebral hemodynamic activity has the potential to provide such a measure. Here we used functional NIRS to evaluate brain activation to an innocuous and a noxious electrical stimulus on healthy human subjects (n = 11). For both innocuous and noxious stimuli, we observed a signal change in the primary somatosensory cortex contralateral to the stimulus. The painful and non-painful stimuli can be differentiated based on their signal size and profile. We also observed that repetitive noxious stimuli resulted in adaptation of the signal. Furthermore, the signal was distinguishable from a skin sympathetic response to pain that tended to mask it. Our results support the notion that functional NIRS has a potential utility as an objective measure of pain.
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    Large arteriolar component of oxygen delivery implies safe margin of oxygen supply to cerebral tissue
    (2014) Sakadzic, Sava; Mandeville, Emiri; Gagnon, Louis; Musacchia, Joseph J.; Yaseen, Mohammad; Yücel, Meryem A.; Lefebvre, Joel; Lesage, Frédéric; Dale, Anders M.; Eikermann-Haerter, Katharina; Ayata, Cenk; Srinivasan, Vivek J.; Lo, Eng; Devor, Anna; Boas, David
    What is the organization of cerebral microvascular oxygenation and morphology that allows adequate tissue oxygenation at different activity levels? We address this question in the mouse cerebral cortex using microscopic imaging of intravascular O2 partial pressure and blood flow combined with numerical modeling. Here we show that parenchymal arterioles are responsible for 50% of the extracted O2 at baseline activity and the majority of the remaining O2 exchange takes place within the first few capillary branches. Most capillaries release little O2 at baseline acting as an O2 reserve that is recruited during increased neuronal activity or decreased blood flow. Our results challenge the common perception that capillaries are the major site of O2 delivery to cerebral tissue. The understanding of oxygenation distribution along arterio-capillary paths may have profound implications for the interpretation of BOLD fMRI signal and for evaluating microvascular O2 delivery capacity to support cerebral tissue in disease.