Physiological models comparison for the analysis of ASL FMRI data

Physiological models have been proposed to describe the processes that underlie the link between neural and hemodynamic activity in the brain. Among these, the Balloon model describes the changes in blood flow, blood volume and oxygen concentration when an hemodynamic response is ensuing neural activation. Next, an hemodynamic model links these variables to the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) effect. Taken together, these equations allow the precise modeling of the coupling between the cerebral blood flow and hemodynamic response. However, several competing versions of the hemodynamic model and different physiological parameters values have been described in the literature. In this work, we analyse Arterial Spin Labelling (ASL) functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data, which contains both perfusion and hemodynamic effects, to compare the impact of different settings in the coupling between blood flow and hemodynamic response.