Modelling of mitochondrial oxygen consumption and NIRS detection of cytochrome oxidase redox state

In recent years there has been widespread use of near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to monitor the brain. The signals of interest include changes in the levels of oxygenated and deoxygenated haemoglobin and tissue oxygen saturation. In addition to oxy- and deoxy-haemoglobin, the Cu(A) centre in cytochrome-c-oxidase (CCO) is a significant NIR absorber, giving rise to another signal termed the ΔoxCCO signal. This signal has great potential as a marker of cellular oxygen metabolism, but is also the hardest to interpret. Here we use a recently constructed model to predict NIRS signal changes, and compare the model output to data from an in vivo hypoxia study in healthy adults. Our findings indicate strongly that the ΔoxCCO signal contains useful information despite the noise, and has responses consistent with the known physiology.