Complexity Analysis on Functional-Near Infrared Spectroscopy Time Series: a Preliminary Study on Mental Arithmetic

It is well known that physiological systems show complex and nonlinear behaviours. In spite of that, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is usually analyzed in the time and frequency domains with the assumption that metabolic activity is generated from a linear system. To leverage the full information provided by fNIRS signals, in this study we investigate topological entropy in fNIRS series collected from 10 healthy subjects during mental mental arithmetic task. While sample entropy and fuzzy entropy were used to estimate time series irregularity, distribution entropy was used to estimate time series complexity. Our findings show that entropy estimates may provide complementary characterization of fNIRS dynamics with respect to reference time domain measurements. This finding paves the way to further investigate functional activation in fNIRS in different case studies using nonlinear and complexity system theory.