The feasibility of utilizing EEG-fNIRS to characterize the cortical activation difference between healthy subjects and post-stroke patients

The feasibility of utilizing concurrent electroencephalography (EEG) and functional Near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) recording to characterize the difference in cortical activities between stroke patients (n=3) and healthy controls (n=3) was evaluated with a motor execution task. The asymmetry indicators, including inter-hemispheric sample entropy (IHI_En) derived from EEG signal and inter-hemispheric Oxygenated hemoglobin (IHI_HbO) concentration change derived from the fNIRS signal were extracted and compared. The IHI_En and IHI_HbO showed an observable difference between the stroke patients and healthy control group. The preliminary results demonstrated the feasibility of utilizing the concurrent EEG-fNIRS approach to assess the recovery progress of post-stroke patients with motor impairment.