Data-driven beamforming techniques to attenuate ballistocardiogram (BCG) artefacts in EEG-fMRI without detecting cardiac pulses in electrocardiography (ECG) recordings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Simultaneous recording of EEG and fMRI is a very promising non-invasive neuroimaging technique, providing a wide range of complementary information to characterize underlying mechanisms associated with brain functions. However, EEG data obtained from the simultaneous EEG-fMRI recordings are strongly influenced by MRI related artefacts, namely gradient artefacts (GA) and ballistocardiogram (BCG) artefacts. The GA is induced by temporally varying magnetic field gradients used for MR imaging, whereas the BCG artefacts are produced by cardiac pulse driven head motion in the strong magnetic field of the MRI scanner, so that this BCG artefact will be present when the subject is lying in the scanner, even when no fMRI data are acquired. When compared to corrections of the GA, the BCG artefact corrections are more challenging to remove due to its inherent variabilities and dynamic changes over time. Typically, the BCG artefacts obscure the EEG signals below 20Hz, and this remains problematic especially when the frequency of interest of EEG signals is below 20Hz, such as Alpha (8-13Hz) and Beta (13-30Hz) band EEG activity, or sleep spindle (11-16Hz) and slow-wave oscillations (<1 Hz) during sleep. The standard BCG artefact corrections, as for instance Average Artefact Subtraction method (AAS), require detecting cardiac pulse (R-peak) events from simultaneous electrocardiography (ECG) recordings. However, ECG signals in the MRI scanner are sometimes distorted and will become problematic for detecting reliable R-peaks. In this study, we focused on a beamforming technique, which is a spatial filtering technique to reject sources of signal variance that do not appear dipolar in the source space. This technique attenuates all unwanted source activities outside of a presumed region of interest without having to specify the location or the configuration of these underlying source signals. Specifically, in this study, we revisited the advantages of the beamforming technique to attenuate the BCG artefact in EEG-fMRI, and also to recover meaningful task-based induced neural signals during an attentional network task (ANT) which required participants to identify visual cues and respond as accurately and quickly as possible. We analysed EEG-fMRI data in 20 healthy participants when they were performing the ANT, and compared four different BCG correction approaches (non-BCG corrected, AAS BCG corrected, beamforming+AAS BCG corrected, beamforming BCG corrected). We demonstrated that beamforming BCG corrected data did not only significantly reduce the BCG artefacts, but also significantly recovered the expected task-based induced brain activity when compared to the standard AAS BCG corrections. Without detecting R-peak events from the ECG, this data-driven beamforming technique appears promising especially for longer data acquisition of sleep and resting EEG-fMRI. Our findings extend previous work regarding the recovery of meaningful EEG signals by an optimized suppression of MRI related artefacts. Highlights Beamforming spatial filtering technique attenuates ballistocardiogram (BCG) artefacts in EEG-fMRI without detecting cardiac pulses in electrocardiography (ECG) recordings. Beamforming BCG denoising technique recovers expected task-based induced visual alpha and motor beta event-related desynchronization (ERD). Beamforming technique improves signal-noise ratios (SNR) of neural activities as compared to sensor level signals. Data-driven beamforming technique appears promising for longer data acquisition of sleep and resting EEG-fMRI without relying on ECG signals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".