Abstract #2297

A Novel Approach to the Quantitative Estimation of the Oxygen Metabolism Response to a Neural Stimulus That Accounts for Uncertainty Due to Unmeasured Physiological Parameters

Aaron Benjamin Simon¹, Valerie E M Griffeth¹, Richard B. Buxton²

¹Bioengineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States; ²Radiology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States

We examined whether we could estimate the CMRO₂ response to a stimulus, as well as the uncertainty of that estimate, by measuring baseline R₂' and the CBF and BOLD responses. We related the three measurements to the CMRO₂ response through a detailed, multi-compartment BOLD model and adopted a Bayesian approach to determine how uncertainty in unmeasured physiological parameters of the model affected the precision of the estimate the CMRO₂ response. We tested the method with a hypercapnia challenge and found that the estimate agreed well with previous work but that the unmeasured parameters produced considerable uncertainty in the estimate.