Motion artifact cancellation in NIR spectroscopy using discrete Kalman filtering

BACKGROUND: As a continuation of our earlier work, we present in this study a Kalman filtering based algorithm for the elimination of motion artifacts present in Near Infrared spectroscopy (NIR) measurements. Functional NIR measurements suffer from head motion especially in real world applications where movement cannot be restricted such as studies involving pilots, children, etc. Since head movement can cause fluctuations unrelated to metabolic changes in the blood due to the cognitive activity, removal of these artifacts from NIR signal is necessary for reliable assessment of cognitive activity in the brain for real life applications. METHODS: Previously, we had worked on adaptive and Wiener filtering for the cancellation of motion artifacts in NIR studies. Using the same NIR data set we have collected in our previous work where different speed motion artifacts were induced on the NIR measurements we compared the results of the newly proposed Kalman filtering approach with the results of previously studied adaptive and Wiener filtering methods in terms of gains in signal to noise ratio. Here, comparisons are based on paired t-tests where data from eleven subjects are used. RESULTS: The preliminary results in this current study revealed that the proposed Kalman filtering method provides better estimates in terms of the gain in signal to noise ratio than the classical adaptive filtering approach without the need for additional sensor measurements and results comparable to Wiener filtering but better suitable for real-time applications. CONCLUSIONS: This paper presented a novel approach based on Kalman filtering for motion artifact removal in NIR recordings. The proposed approach provides a suitable solution to the motion artifact removal problem in NIR studies by combining the advantages of the existing adaptive and Wiener filtering methods in one algorithm which allows efficient real time application with no requirement on additional sensor measurements.