Agreement in cerebrovascular reactivity assessed with diffuse correlation spectroscopy across experimental paradigms improves with short separation regression

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-1-2023

Abstract

Significance: Cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR), i.e., the ability of cerebral vasculature to dilate or constrict in response to vasoactive stimuli, is a biomarker of vascular health. Exogenous administration of inhaled carbon dioxide, i.e., hypercapnia (HC), remains the ggold-standard h intervention to assess CVR. More tolerable paradigms that enable CVR quantification when HC is difficult/contraindicated have been proposed. However, because these paradigms feature mechanistic differences in action, an assessment of agreement of these more tolerable paradigms to HC is needed. Aim: We aim to determine the agreement of CVR assessed during HC, breath-hold (BH), and resting state (RS) paradigms. Approach: Healthy adults were subject to HC, BH, and RS paradigms. End tidal carbon dioxide (EtCO2) and cerebral blood flow (CBF, assessed with diffuse correlation spectroscopy) were monitored continuously. CVR (%/mmHg) was quantified via linear regression of CBF versus EtCO2 or via a general linear model (GLM) that was used to minimize the influence of systemic and extracerebral signal contributions. Results: Strong agreement (CCC ≥ 0.69; R ≥ 0.76) among CVR paradigms was demonstrated when utilizing a GLM to regress out systemic/extracerebral signal contributions. Linear regression alone showed poor agreement across paradigms (CCC ≤ 0.35; R ≤ 0.45). Conclusions: More tolerable experimental paradigms coupled with regression of systemic/ extracerebral signal contributions may offer a viable alternative to HC for assessing CVR.

Journal Title

Neurophotonics

Journal ISSN

2329423X

Volume

10

Issue

2

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1117/1.NPh.10.2.025002

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