Testing for nonlinearity in functional near-infrared spectroscopy of brain activities by surrogate data methods.

Methods of contemporary physics are increasingly important for biomedical research. For a multitude of diverse reasons there exists a gap between the practitioners of biomedicine and modern physics methodologies. In this work, the technique of surrogate data has been used as a method to test for the linearity or nonlinearity of biomedical functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals observing brain activities. Throughout three different surrogate tests, the third-order autocovariance, the asymmetry resulting from time reversal, and the delay vector variance, the dynamic response of brain activities through fNIRS biomedical signals is very likely to be a nonlinear system.