A computer-implemented method of monitoring dynamics of patient brain state during neurosurgical procedures includes receiving a plurality of brain response images acquired using a functional MRI scan of a patient over a plurality of time points and selecting a plurality of image features from the brain response images. One or more recurrent neural network (RNN) model are used to directly estimate one or more brain state measurements at each time point based on the image features. Once estimated, the brain state measurements are presented on a display.