Radiofrequency safety of high permittivity pads in MRI—Impact of insulation material

Purpose: High permittivity dielectric pads are known to be effective for tailoring the RF field and improving image quality in high field MRI. Despite a number of studies reporting benign specific absorption rate (SAR) effects, their “universal” safety remains an open concern. In this work, we evaluate the impact of the insulation material in...

Personalized local SAR prediction for parallel transmit neuroimaging at 7T from a single T1-weighted dataset

Purpose: Parallel RF transmission (PTx) is one of the key technologies enabling high quality imaging at ultra-high fields (≥7T). Compliance with regulatory limits on the local specific absorption rate (SAR) typically involves over-conservative safety margins to account for intersubject variability, which negatively affect the utilization of...

Design and evaluation of a modular multimodality imaging phantom to simulate heterogeneous uptake and enhancement patterns for radiomic quantification in hybrid imaging: A feasibility study

Background: Accuracy and precision assessment in radiomic features is important for the determination of their potential to characterize cancer lesions. In this regard, simulation of different imaging conditions using specialized phantoms is increasingly being investigated. In this study, the design and evaluation of a modular multimodality...

Effects of Simulated Error-Sources on Different 3-D CSI-EPT Strategies

Three-dimensional contrast source inversion-electrical properties tomography (3-D CSI-EPT) is an iterative reconstruction method that estimates the electrical properties of tissue from transmit field magnetic resonance data. However, in order to bring 3-D CSI-EPT into practice for complex tissue structures and to understand the origin and...

Sensitivity of 3-D CSI-EPT Reconstructions to Modelled EM Field Variations and Object Truncation

Model-based electrical properties tomography (EPT; [1,2]) reconstruction with 3-D Contrast Source Inversion-EPT (CSI-EPT; [3,4]) has high potential, but is inherently sensitive to small errors in the model used. Here we assess its sensitivity to errors in the incident electromagnetic (EM) fields due to coupling of the coil to the sample (loading...

Accelerating implant RF safety assessment using a low-rank inverse update method

Purpose: Patients who have medical metallic implants, e.g. orthopaedic implants and pacemakers, often cannot undergo an MRI exam. One of the largest risks is tissue heating due to the radio frequency (RF) fields. The RF safety assessment of implants is computationally demanding. This is due to the large dimensions of the transmit coil...

A simulation study on the effect of optimized high permittivity materials on fetal imaging at 3T

PURPOSE: One of the main concerns in fetal MRI is the radiofrequency power that is absorbed both by the mother and the fetus. Passive shimming using high permittivity materials in the form of "dielectric pads" has previously been shown to increase the formula presented efficiency and homogeneity in different applications, while reducing the...

First-Order Induced Current Density Imaging and Electrical Properties Tomography in MRI

In this paper, we present an efficient dedicated electrical properties tomography (EPT) algorithm (called first-order current density EPT ) that exploits the particular radio frequency field structure, which is present in the midplane of a birdcage coil, to reconstruct conductivity and permittivity maps in this plane from B ^ + 1 data. The...

3-D Contrast Source Inversion-Electrical Properties Tomography

Contrast source inversion – electrical properties tomography (CSI-EPT) is an iterative reconstruction method to retrieve the electrical properties (EPs) of tissues from MR data. The method is based on integral representations of the electromagnetic (EM) field and has been shown to allow EP reconstructions of small structures as...