Abstract
Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is one of the methods that can measure oxygenation and blood volume in muscle and other tissues in vivo. This review gains an insight into the progress, which has been made for evaluating skeletal muscle oxygenation and oxidative energy metabolism. A new horizon for the measurement will be addressed such as brown adipose tissue evaluation using NIRS. Thus, the presentation comprises 1) the validation of muscle NIRS measurement, 2) the application of muscle NIRS to medical science, and 3) a novel evaluation of brown adipose tissue using NIRS.NIRS has been shown to be useful for the detection of changes in muscle metabolism and oxygen delivery in healthy subjects as well as in patients with various organ diseases. The use of NIRS devices has become useful for both muscle and brown adipose tissue measurements.
