Modeling FMRI Signals Can Provide Insights into Neural Processing in the Cerebral Cortex

Every stimulus or task activates multiple areas in the mammalian cortex. These distributed activations can be measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which has the best spatial resolution among the noninvasive brain imaging methods. Unfortunately, the relationship between the fMRI activations and distributed cortical processing has remained unclear, both because the coupling between neural and fMRI activations has remained poorly understood and because fMRI voxels are too large to directly sense the local neural events. To get an idea of the local processing given the macroscopic data, we need models to simulate the neural activity and to provide output that can be compared with fMRI data. Such models can describe neural mechanisms as mathematical functions between input and output in a specific system, with little correspondence to physiological mechanisms. Alternatively, models can be biomimetic, including biological details with straightforward correspondence to experimental data. After careful balancing between complexity, computational efficiency, and realism, a biomimetic simulation should be able to provide insight into how biological structures or functions contribute to actual data processing as well as to promote theory-driven neuroscience experiments. This review analyzes the requirements for validating system-level computational models with fMRI. In particular, we study mesoscopic biomimetic models, which include a limited set of details from real-life networks and enable system-level simulations of neural mass action. In addition, we discuss how recent developments in neurophysiology and biophysics may significantly advance the modelling of fMRI signals.