Scanner artifact removal in simultaneous EEG-fMRI for epileptic seizure prediction

Simultaneous recording of electroencephalographic (EEG) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) has been a new modality in brain imaging very recently. Blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) in fMRI provides sufficient information about the hemodynamics of the brain during changes in the brain metabolism such as in the event of seizure. However, the major drawback of these joint recordings is the destructive effect of the fMRI scanner artifact. Without removal of such artifact the EEG signals cannot be processed. In this paper, an effective method for removal of the scanner artifact has been established by applying blind source extraction (BSE) algorithm followed by the averaging-and-subtraction method. The results have shown that the scanner artifacts have been effectively mitigated.