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...

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...

Transverse-EPT: A local first order electrical properties tomography approach not requiring estimation of the incident fields

A new local method for magnetic resonance electrical properties tomography (EPT), dubbed transverse-EPT (T-EPT), is introduced. This approach iteratively optimizes the dielectric properties (conductivity and permittivity) and the z-component of the electric field strength, exploiting the locally E-polarized field structure typically present...

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...

High-permittivity pad design tool for 7T neuroimaging and 3T body imaging

Purpose: High-permittivity materials in the form of flexible “dielectric pads” have proved very useful for addressing RF inhomogeneities in high field MRI systems. Finding the optimal design of such pads is, however, a tedious task, reducing the impact of this technique. We present an easy-to-use software tool which allows researchers and...

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...

Developments in electrical-property tomography based on the contrast-source inversion method

The main objective of electrical-property tomography (EPT) is to retrieve dielectric tissue parameters from B ₁ ⁺ data as measured by a magnetic-resonance (MR) scanner. This is a so-called hybrid inverse problem in which data are defined inside the reconstruction domain of interest. In this paper, we discuss recent and...

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...

High-Permittivity Pad Design for Dielectric Shimming in Magnetic Resonance Imaging Using Projection-Based Model Reduction and a Nonlinear Optimization Scheme

Inhomogeneities in the transmit radio frequency magnetic field ( {\text{B}}-{1}^{+} ) reduce the quality of magnetic resonance (MR) images. This quality can be improved by using high-permittivity pads that tailor the {\text{B}}-{1}^{+} fields. The design of an optimal pad is application-specific and not straightforward and would therefore...

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...