Fuzzy Logic Approach to Investigating the Language Dominance Using Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

Syoji Kobashi, Tsunaki Matsumoto, Yutaka Hata, Yuri, T. Kitamuma(1,2 and Toshio Yanagida(1,2
*)Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine

2)Communication Research Laboratory

Proceedings of Third International Forum on Multimedia & Image Processing
IFMIP053, (2002)

Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a recently developed method, which can investigate the human brain function with noninvasive, high time resolution, and high portability. It has been applied to assessment of language dominance by Watanabe et al, however, it has a risk which some measurement points took other brain activities occurred in like the motor area. This paper improves the method by introducing fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic is used to giving fuzzy degrees belonging to the speech, motor and other areas for each measurement point. Using the obtained fuzzy degrees, we redefine the laterality index as the fuzzy mean of the laterality indexes for all paired measurement points.