Non-separable spatiotemporal brain hemodynamics contain neural information

The goal of many functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies is to infer neural activity from hemodynamic signals. Classical fMRI analysis approaches assume a canonical hemodynamic response function (HRF), which is identical in every voxel. Canonical HRFs imply space-time separability. Many studies explored the relevance of non-separable HRFs. These studies were focusing on the relationship between stimuli or electroencephalographic data and fMRI data. It is not clear from these studies whether non-separable spatiotemporal dynamics of fMRI signals contain neural information. This study provides direct empirical evidence that non-separable spatiotemporal deconvolutions of multivariate fMRI time series predict intracortical neural signals better than standard canonical HRF models. Our results demonstrate that there is more neural information in fMRI signals than detected by most analysis methods.