Abstract #1409

Locke L, Rogers W, Meyer C, Chen W

Time-varying magnetic gradients produce dramatic noise on ECG waveforms due to their inducement of eddy currents in tissue. This presents a challenge for patient monitoring and cardiac gating during interventional MR procedures. It has been proposed that this noise can be effectively removed by modeling the effect of the gradients on the ECG signal as a linear time-invariant (LTI) system. We verified this fundamental assumption by testing the system for the following properties: scalability, homogeneity, and superposition. Our results indicate that these properties are reasonably verified and that it is appropriate to model the system as LTI.