Physiological recordings: Basic concepts and implementation during functional magnetic resonance imaging

Abstract

Combining human functional neuroimaging with other forms of psychophysiological measurement, including autonomic monitoring, provides an empirical basis for understanding brain–body interactions. This approach can be applied to characterize unwanted physiological noise, examine the neural control and representation of bodily processes relevant to health and morbidity, and index covert expression of affective and cognitive processes to enhance the interpretation of task-evoked regional brain activity. In recent years, human neuroimaging has been dominated by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. The spatiotemporal information of fMRI regarding central neural activity is valuably complemented by parallel physiological monitoring, yet such studies still remain in the minority. This review article highlights fMRI studies that employed cardiac, vascular, respiratory, electrodermal, gastrointestinal and pupillary psychophysiological indices to address specific questions regarding interaction between brain and bodily state in the context of experience, cognition, emotion and behaviour. Physiological monitoring within the fMRI environment presents specific technical issues, most importantly related to safety. Mechanical and electrical hazards may present dangers to scanned subjects, operator and/or equipment. Furthermore, physiological monitoring may interfere with the quality of neuroimaging data, or itself be compromised by artefacts induced by the operation of the scanner. We review the sources of these potential problems and the current approaches and advice to enable the combination of fMRI and physiological monitoring in a safe and effective manner.

The neural subjective frame: from bodily signals to perceptual consciousness

“…Those results have since been reproduced by a number of groups [61,62]. Those results imply that a hidden but robust covariate in simple forewarned reaction-time task is heart deceleration/ acceleration, a fact seldom taken into account in imaging studies [63], although differential activation between two conditions attributed to differences in cognitive processing could actually correspond to differential activity of brain regions either receiving heart information or controlling heart rate.…”

Hemodynamic and EEG Time-Courses During Unilateral Hand Movement in Patients with Cortical Myoclonus. An EEG-fMRI and EEG-TD-fNIRS Study

“…Scanning and cardiac artifacts were removed using the software provided with the EEG system (System Plus Evolution v.1.4.50, Micromed SpA). Gradientswitching and radio frequency artifacts in the EEG and EMG signals were removed by means of average model subtraction followed by adaptive filtering; the ballistocardiogram was subsequently removed using a similar approach, with each QRS complex being identified (Allen et al 1998(Allen et al , 2000Gray et al 2009). …”

Measurement fidelity of heart rate variability signal processing: The devil is in the details

“…There is growing interest and advancements using neuroimaging techniques (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging) to better understand neurobiological (brain-body) interactions (c.f., Gianaros and Sheu, 2009;Gianaros et al, 2004). For example, HF has been associated with activity within the ventral anterior cingulate (Matthews et al, 2004), posterior cingulate cortex (O'Connor et al, 2007), amygdala, periaqueductal gray, and the hypothalamus in response to somatosensory stimuli (Gray et al, 2009) and isometric exercise (Napadow et al, 2008). Given the evidence of an association between the brain and the ANS (i.e., parasympathetic and sympathetic activity), these promising research directions underscore the importance of purposeful and informed selection of HRV parameters.…”