A Resilient, Non-neuronal Source of the Spatiotemporal Lag Structure Detected by BOLD Signal-Based Blood Flow Tracking

Recent evidence has suggested that blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signals convey information about brain circulation via low frequency oscillation of systemic origin (sLFO) that travels through the vascular structure ("lag mapping"). Prompted by its promising application in both physiology and pathology, we examined this signal component using multiple approaches. A total of 30 healthy volunteers were recruited to perform two reproducibility experiments at 3 Tesla using multiband echo planar imaging. The first experiment investigated the effect of denoising and the second was designed to study the effect of subject behavior on lag mapping. The lag map's intersession test-retest reproducibility and image contrast were both diminished by removal of either the neuronal or the non-neuronal (e.g., cardiac, respiratory) components by independent component analysis-based denoising, suggesting that the neurovascular coupling also comprises a part of the BOLD lag structure. The lag maps were, at the same time, robust against local perfusion increases due to visuomotor task and global changes in perfusion induced by breath-holding at the same level as the intrasession reliability. The lag structure was preserved after time-locked averaging to the visuomotor task and breath-holding events, while any preceding signal changes were canceled out for the visuomotor task, consistent with the passive effect of neurovascular coupling in the venous side of the vasculature. These findings support the current assumption that lag mapping primarily reflects vascular structure despite the presence of sLFO perturbation of neuronal or non-neuronal origin and, thus, emphasize the vascular origin of the lag map, encouraging application of BOLD-based blood flow tracking.