Currently my research interest is in the field of theoretical biology, namely within the field of theoretical neuroscience. My PhD was on the spatiotemporal dynamics of the Blood oxygenated-level dependent signal, measured with fMRI. In this field there is little attention paid to the spatiotemporal nature of blood flow in the cortex. My work strives to uncover the spatial nature of blood flow by building a theoretical model and testing this through highly resolved fMRI in humans.From a physics point of view: a way to tackle this is to use a mean-field approximation of the underlying cortical vasculature. This involves averaging over the dense vessels, then treating cortical tissue as a porous structure. In this framework the vessels penetrate cortical tissue which form the pores of the system. Applying physical laws to this system we derived our spatiotemporal model for hemodynamics.Along with our experimental findings, we provide support for our physical intuition: that the cortical vasculature can supports a patiotemporal oversupply of blood flow.Kevin Aquino is a member of the Complex Systems Research Group.
