Reduction of EEG artifacts in simultaneous EEG-fMRI: Reference layer adaptive filtering (RLAF)

Although simultaneous measurement of electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is one of the most valuable methods for studying human brain activity non-invasively, it remains challenging to measure high quality EEG inside the MRI scanner. Recently, a new approach for minimizing residual MRI scanner artifacts in the EEG was presented: reference layer artifact subtraction (RLAS). Here, reference electrodes capture only the artifacts, which are subsequently subtracted from the measurement electrodes. With the present work we demonstrate that replacing the subtraction by adaptive filtering statistically significantly outperforms RLAS. Reference layer adaptive filtering (RLAF) attenuates the average artifact root-mean-square (RMS) voltage of the passive MRI scanner to 0.7 μV (-14.4 dB). RLAS achieves 0.78 μV (-13.5 dB). The combination of average artifact subtraction (AAS) and RLAF reduces the residual average gradient artifact RMS voltage to 2.3 μV (-49.2 dB). AAS alone achieves 5.7 μV (-39.0 dB). All measurements were conducted with an MRI phantom, as the reference layer cap available to us was a prototype.