Abstract:
Schizophrenia is a neurological disorder and typically persists for a life. Investigation of the cerebral hemodynamics of schizophrenic patients with a rapid, non-invasive and precise technique is required to improve the prognosis and guide therapeutic interventions. Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a non-invasive brain imaging technique measuring the changes in oxy-hemoglobin and deoxy-hemoglobin particularly in prefrontal cortex. In this study, fNIRS was used during a Stroop task to investigate the differences in oscillatory dynamics between schizophrenic patients and control subjects. Spectral analysis and dyadic wavelet transform were employed to quantify the degree of loss of cerebral activation and to localize the major areas of loss of activation in the prefrontal cortex. In this study, it was found that specific brain areas are responsible for generating specific oscillatory patterns and energies of these patterns are significantly reduced in schizophrenic patients.|Keywords: Schizophrenia, Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), Spectral Analysis, Wavelet Decomposition, Stroop Task.
