Neurovascular coupling: insights from multi-modal dynamic causal modelling of fMRI and MEG

This technical note presents a framework for investigating the underlying mechanisms of neurovascular coupling in the human brain using multi-modal magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) neuroimaging data. This amounts to estimating the evidence for several biologically informed models of neurovascular coupling using variational Bayesian methods and selecting the most plausible explanation using Bayesian model comparison. First, fMRI data is used to localise active neuronal sources. The coordinates of neuronal sources are then used as priors in the specification of a DCM for MEG, in order to estimate the underlying generators of the electrophysiological responses. The ensuing estimates of neuronal parameters are used to generate neuronal drive functions, which model the pre or post synaptic responses to each experimental condition in the fMRI paradigm. These functions form the input to a model of neurovascular coupling, the parameters of which are estimated from the fMRI data. This establishes a Bayesian fusion technique that characterises the BOLD response - asking, for example, whether instantaneous or delayed pre or post synaptic signals mediate haemodynamic responses. Bayesian model comparison is used to identify the most plausible hypotheses about the causes of the multimodal data. We illustrate this procedure by comparing a set of models of a single-subject auditory fMRI and MEG dataset. Our exemplar analysis suggests that the origin of the BOLD signal is mediated instantaneously by intrinsic neuronal dynamics and that neurovascular coupling mechanisms are region-specific. The code and example dataset associated with this technical note are available through the statistical parametric mapping (SPM) software package.