Validating NORDIC denoising on high-resolution fMRI data at 7 T

High-resolution fMRI is dominated by thermal noise. The NORDIC PCA filter is a promising method to remove thermal noise but its effect on the spatial fidelity of layer-dependent profiles is sparsely investigated. We evaluated the performance of NORDIC with several parameter setting for laminar fMRI at 7 T and sought to investigate the effect NORDIC has on the shape of the profiles. Our results suggest that NORDIC indeed affects high-resolution profiles but the overall effect can be seen to be small and can be further reduced with careful parameter settings.