Pharmacological Applications of fMRI

The combination of fMRI with pharmacological interventions can provide valuable insights into how a given molecule impacts on the brain’s function. Pharmacological fMRI (pharmaco-fMRI) thus is of interest to both systems neuroscience to better understand the brain’s neurochemistry and to pharmacologists at several stages of compound development and validation. In this chapter, we describe the potential of pharmaco-fMRI in the context of systems neuroscience and neuropharmacology. We then discuss the limitations of using BOLD fMRI in the context of pharmacological interventions and highlight how to combine pharmaco-fMRI with other techniques to dissociate neuronal from non-neuronal contributions of a compound to the BOLD signal. In the last section, we outline key methodological considerations to optimize the design of pharmaco-fMRI experiments.