Abstract
This study proposes a verbally-based cognitive task for elderlies and measurement of cerebral blood flow (CBF) activation during the task. During the task, an elderly firstly talks four topics about season, travel, gourmet, and daily life, and then he/she does three cognitive tasks of reminiscence, category recall, and working memory. With the use of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), we collected 42 channels of fNIRS signals from the frontal, right and left temporal areas from 42 elderly participants (14 males and 28 females between the ages of 64 to 93) at National Hospital for Geriatric Medicine, NCGG. The elderly participants were classified into three clinical groups: 11 patients with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 19 participants with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 12 cognitively normal persons (CN). Moreover, MCI group is divided into two subtypes of Amnestic-MCI (A-MCI) composed of nine participants and Nonamnestic-MCI (N-MCI) composed of ten participants. We will present a comparative analysis of CBF activation between CN, N-MCI, A-MCI, and AD, by statistical tests of between-group significant differences using fNIRS signals of oxy-Hb during the cognitive task.
