Abstract
The artifact induced on the EEG recorded inside an MRI scanner as a result of the cardiac function—the pulse artifact (PA)—remains one of the most challenging problems in simultaneous EEG-fMRI studies. Although the biophysical mechanisms underlying the PA are not yet completely understood, an increasing body of evidence indicates three possible cardiac-related sources: bulk head motion induced by the arrival of blood to the head, pulsatile dilation of the scalp, and Hall effects in the moving blood inside the head. Based on these hypothesized mechanisms, some efforts have been made to minimize the occurrence of the PA by accordingly optimizing the recording setup or the experimental protocol. Regardless of the data acquisition procedure, however, post-processing artifact reduction is always required to some extent. Various methods have been proposed for PA reduction, which may be classified into three main categories: temporal waveform-based methods, spatiotemporal pattern-based methods, and sensor-based methods. Approaches based on independent component analysis (ICA) in combination with average artifact subtraction (AAS) have often proved to be the most effective. The use of motion sensors to estimate the PA may further improve its reduction, at the cost of modifications to the acquisition setup, including additional equipment in some cases. In general, the effects of applying PA reduction methods on the EEG data should be evaluated in each case, according to the specific experiment and research question.
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Acknowledgments
We acknowledge the financial support by the Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT) through grants LARSyS (UIDB/50009/2020), MIG_N2Treat (PTDC/EMDEMD/29675/2017) and NeurAugVR (PTDC/CCICOM/31485/2017), by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) through grant 185909, and by the CIBM Centre for Biomedical Imaging.
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Abreu, R., Jorge, J., Figueiredo, P. (2022). EEG Quality: The Pulse Artifact. In: Mulert, C., Lemieux, L. (eds) EEG - fMRI. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07121-8_8
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