Identifying diagnostic biomarkers of pain is of utmost clinical importance. This is challenging since similar fMRI patterns are elicited by painful and equisalient non-painful stimuli at 3T. To decipher pain-specificity this work uses 7T high-resolution fMRI of (1) salient non-painful versus painful stimuli, (2) different types of painful stimuli in "healthy" controls versus (3) a subject with a genetically-induced pain-free phenotype. We found that canonical HRF modeling is insufficient to reliably capture the shape of elicited BOLD responses that further varied in correlation to perceived saliency.
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