A computational multiresolution BOLD fMRI model.

Abstract

Blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a widely used method for brain mapping. BOLD fMRI signal detection is based on an intravoxel dephasing mechanism. This model involves bulk nuclear spin precession in a BOLD-induced inhomogeneous magnetic field within a millimeter-resolution voxel, that is, BOLD signal formation spans a huge spatial scale range from Angstrom to millimeter. In this letter, we present a computational model for multiresolution BOLD fMRI simulation, which consists of partitioning the nuclear spin pool into spin packets at a mesoscopic scale (∼10(-6) m), and calculating multiresolution voxel signals by grouping spin packets at a macroscopic scale range (10(-5) to 10(-3) m). Under a small-angle approximation, we find that the BOLD signal intensity is related to its phase counterpart (or BOLD fieldmap) across two spatial resolution levels.