Modeling Nitric Oxide Induced Neural Activity and Neurovascular Coupling in a Cerebellum Circuit

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows to identify brain regions activated during rest, normal and diseased conditions attributing a function or a task to microcircuit activity. In order to understand signals from fMRI techniques, bottom-up modeling would be needed to reconstruct the neurovascular coupling attributing neural activity to local blood flow changes. In this paper, we present a bottom-up mathematical modeling of neuro-vascular coupling in rat cerebellum granule cells. Granule cells are numerous and main source for NO production in cerebellum. While matching experimental estimations, the effect of cerebellar blood flow and neural activity, a model of nitric oxide (NO) in the cerebellar granular was simulated and the diffusion, production and consumption of NO at the synapse and the contribution for neuro vascular coupling was modeled. This paper showcases the first step attributing cerebellum sub-molecular changes to clinical observations reconstructing neural activity mappings to population responses when combined with BOLD modeling.