Luca Pollonini (UH) and Sridhar Madala (Indus Instruments).
Method and apparatus for functional hemodynamic brain imaging.
This intellectual property is titled, “Method and apparatus for functional hemodynamic brain imaging” (UHID 2017-057) and invented by Luca Pollonini (UH) and Sridhar Madala(Indus Instruments), and is described as: This invention comprises an optical system consisting of a network of electro-optical sensors of physiological signals related to brainactivity and software that controls the data acquisition in an optimum manner. Each electro-optical sensor comprises 1) one electrode for sensing electrical brain activity, 2) oneoptical source emitting two or more near infrared (NIR) light wavelengths for illuminating the cerebral cortex, and 3) one photodetector for detecting near infrared light reflected bythe cerebral cortex. When electro-optical sensors are connected, with or without wires, into a network that is physically placed onto the human head, each node of the network(EON: electrooptical node) is able to collect the brain’s electrical activity and, simultaneously, is programmed to either 1) illuminate the brain with NIR light, or 2) collect NIR lightcoming from a light-emitting EON located in vicinity and reflected by the brain proportionally to the functional blood flow. Since the selected emitted/detector function of a node canbe reprogrammed at any time, each node is renamed Dynamic Electro-Optical Node (DEON). Ultimately, the programmability of DEONs allows the acquisition of electrical andoptical readings related to brain activity from a maximally dense network.