Neuroreport
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Previous imaging studies of pain used a block design of prolonged (up to 1 min) noxious stimulation that are not well tolerated and subject to temporal interactions. We describe an adaptation of event-related fMRI to study pain with short duration stimuli. ⋯ Brief pain-related activations were clearly identified in the cortex and thalamus with a hemodynamic delay of 3-6 s. These findings demonstrate that brief stimuli combined with on-line pain ratings can be used to study pain with fMRI.