Mechanistic Modelling Investigates the Neural Basis behind the Hemodynamic Response in fMRI

摘要

This work serves as a basis for a new type of fMRI analysis, which is based on a mechanistic interpretation of the hemodynamic response to synaptic activity. Activation was measured in the visual cortex of 12 healthy controls and ordinary differential equation models were fitted to the time series of the hemodynamic response. This allowed us to reject or refine previously proposed mechanistic hypotheses. This is the first attempt to describe the hemodynamic response quantitatively based on recent neurobiological findings. This mechanistic approach stands in contrast to the standard phenome-nological description using the gamma variate function.