Abstract #3625

Investigating Cardiac Pulsatility in the Brain using EPI Sequences: From Physiological Noise to Physiological Information

Ilia Makedonov^1,2, David E. Crane¹, Bradley J. MacIntosh^1,3

¹Heart & Stroke Foundation Centre for Stroke Recovery, Toronto, ON, Canada; ²Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada; ³Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto, Canada

Cardiac noise is usually filtered and otherwise minimized in resting state BOLD fMRI scans. One theory posits that mechanical damage due to cardiac pulsatility is implicated in brain aging and contributes to the formation of pathological small vessel disease. The purpose of this abstract is to characterize cardiac physiological signal in BOLD fMRI and to compare young and elderly groups. Our preliminary results shows that cohort differences exist between the extent of cardiac pulsatility in gray matter in the young and elderly.