Overview of neuroimaging modalities and levels of inference

This figure illustrates the levels of inference across the neuroimaging modalities applied in my PhD thesis 2026, highlighting molecular, vascular, and functional levels of pharmacological effects. Grey boxes indicate methods implemented in the present work, including phase contrast mapping (PCM) and time-of-flight (TOF) MRI to quantify vascular dynamics and blood flow, PET imaging for receptor occupancy, pseudo-continuous arterial spin labelling (pcASL) to measure cerebral blood flow in absolute units, and BOLD fMRI as a proxy for neural activity via neurovascular coupling. The figure includes an illustration of a neuron created in BioRender (Larsen, 2026; https://BioRender.com/hr2sieq, license ET298AQEL5) and a protein membrane drawn manually in draw.io. The final composition was created in Inkscape.