Origin of the Radio Frequency Pulse Artifact in Simultaneous EEG-fMRI Recording: Rectification at the Carbon-Metal Interface

Simultaneous electroencephalograph-functional magnetic resonance imaging (EEG-fMRI ) recording has become an important tool for investigating spatiotemporal properties of brain events, such as epilepsy, evoked brain responses, and changes in brain rhythms. Reduction of noise in EEG signals during fMRI recording is crucial for acquiring high-quality EEG-fMRI data. The main source of the noise includes the gradient artifact, the radio frequency (RF) pulse artifact, and the cardiac pulse artifact. Since the RF pulse artifact is relatively small in amplitude, little attention has been paid to this artifact, and its origin is not well understood. However, the amplitude of the RF pulse artifact fluctuates randomly even if a very high EEG sampling rate is used, making it more salient than the gradient artifact after postprocessing for noise removal. In this paper, we investigate the cause of the RF pulse artifact in EEG systems that use carbon wires.