Synthesizing Realistic fMRI: A Physiological Dynamics-Driven Hierarchical Diffusion Model for Efficient fMRI Acquisition

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is essential for mapping brain activity but faces challenges like lengthy acquisition time and sensitivity to patient movement, limiting its clinical and machine learning applications. While generative models such as diffusion models can synthesize fMRI signals to alleviate these issues, they often underperform due to neglecting the brain's complex structural and dynamic properties. To address these limitations, we propose the Physiological Dynamics-Driven Hierarchical Diffusion Model, a novel framework integrating two key brain physiological properties into the diffusion process: brain hierarchical regional interactions and multifractal dynamics. To model complex interactions among brain regions, we construct hypergraphs based on the prior knowledge of brain functional parcellation reflected by resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC). This enables the aggregation of fMRI signals across multiple scales and generates hierarchical signals. Additionally, by incorporating the prediction of two key dynamics properties of fMRI-the multifractal spectrum and generalized Hurst exponent-our framework effectively guides the diffusion process, ensuring the preservation of the scale-invariant characteristics inherent in real fMRI data. Our framework employs progressive diffusion generation, with signals representing broader brain region information conditioning those that capture localized details, and unifies multiple inputs during denoising for balanced integration. Experiments demonstrate that our model generates physiologically realistic fMRI signals, potentially reducing acquisition time and enhancing data quality, benefiting clinical diagnostics and machine learning in neuroscience. Our code is available at https://github.com/CUHK-AIM-Group/PDH-Diffusion .