Reduction of ECG and gradient related artifacts in simultaneously recorded human EEG/MRI data

Nowadays, electroencephalography signals can be acquired from a patient lying in a magnetic resonance imaging system. It is even possible to acquire EEG signals during an MR imaging sequence. However, such EEG signals are severely distorted by artifacts originating from various effects (e.g., MR gradients, ECG). In this paper, a simple method is presented to reduce such artifacts. Thereby, special attention is focused on artifacts related to the patient’s electrocardiogram. The method is shown to be effective, adaptive, and automatic.