Tomas Jonsson1,2, Terri Lindholm1, Pierre Vestman1, Maria Kristoffersen Wiberg2, Jerzy Bodurka3, Tie - Qiang Li1
1Medical Physics, Karolinska Huddinge, Stockholm, Sweden; 2CLINTEC, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden; 3NIMH, National Institute of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA
Founded on a number of anticipated advantages, such as, gains in SNR and improved sensitivity in detecting brain activations, the interest in conducting BOLD at higher field strength is continuously growing. However, physiological noises are also amplified with the increased signal strength. Here we propose a straightforward procedure to remove cardiac and respiratory related signal fluctuations and characterize the remaining physiological noise level as a function of hardware settings.