Time-resolved near infrared light propagation using frequency domain superposition

Time-resolved temporal point spread function (TPSF) measurement of near infrared spectroscopic (NIRS) data allows the estimation of absorption and reduced scattering properties of biological tissues. Such analysis requires an iterative calculation of the theoretical TPSF curve using mathematical and computational models of the domain being imaged which are computationally complex and expensive. In this work, an efficient methodology for representing the TPSF data using a superposition of cosines calculated in frequency domain is presented. The proposed method is outlined and tested on finite element realistic models of the human neck and head. Using an adult head model containing ~140k nodes, the TPSF calculation at each node for one source is accelerated from 3.11 s to 1.29 s within an error limit of ± 5% related to the time domain calculation method.