On the characterization of single-event related brain activity from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) measurements

We propose an efficient numerical technique for calibrating the mathematical model that describes the single-event related brain response when fMRI measurements are given. This method employs a regularized Newton technique in conjunction with a Kalman filtering procedure. We have applied this method to estimate the biophysiological parameters of the Balloon model that describes the hemodynamic brain responses. Illustrative results obtained with both synthetic and real fMRI measurements are presented.