Despite millions of people suffering from chronic pain, clinicians still rely on self-reports for the assessment of pain. In attempts to identify objective biomarkers, fMRI studies have revealed an assembly of regions that consistently activates in response to noxious stimuli, but also to non-noxious equally salient stimuli. Since most studies have been performed at 3T or lower, higher field strengths might be able to differentiate pain from saliency. As a first step, we aimed to identify the pain-matrix at ultrahigh fields using an ON/OFF heat stimulation paradigm and show here that the regions associated with the pain-matrix could be identified.
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