CASE REPORT article
Front. Rehabil. Sci.
Sec. Interventions for Rehabilitation
This article is part of the Research TopicInsights in Interventions for Rehabilitation – 2023/2024View all 8 articles
Case Report: fNIRS-guided rehabilitation in refractory post-traumatic dysphagia
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Speech and Swallowing Therapy, Hebei General Hospital, Hebei Province, China
- 2Hebei Provincial Key Laboratory of Cerebral Networks and Cognitive Disorders, Hebei Province, China
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Background: Dysphagia is a common complication of severe traumatic brain injury (sTBI) and may persist despite standard treatment. For refractory cases, there appear to be no more effective therapeutic options available. Case information: A 15-year-old boy continued to suffer from severe dysphagia nine months after severe traumatic brain injury, remaining dependent on tracheostomy and nasogastric feeding. Prior interventions, including two botulinum toxin injections and a 35-day multimodal rehabilitation program, failed to yield meaningful improvement. At readmission, swallowing assessments showed profound impairment, malnutrition, and poor treatment tolerance. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was then applied to map cortical activation and guide targeted therapy. After 42 days, swallowing function improved significantly, with the Functional Oral Intake Scale (FOIS) rising from level I to VI and the Penetration-Aspiration Scale (PAS) decreasing from 8 to 2. Conclusions: The therapeutic outcome of this case suggests that selecting training methods based on fNIRS-identified cortical activation can have a positive and significant impact on swallowing rehabilitation in patients with severe traumatic brain injury.
Keywords: Severe traumatic brain injury, dysphagia, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), Precision assessment, Neurorehabilitation
Received: 25 Sep 2025; Accepted: 13 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang, Guo, Wang, Ma, Wang, Guo and Yin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xiaohan Wang, 1209339500@qq.com
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