Silke Maria Lechner1,2, Bruce Amm3, Hans-Joachim Bungartz2, Thomas K. Foo3, Mika W. Vogel1
1Advanced Medical Applications Laboratory, GE Global Research, Munich, Bavaria, Germany; 2Department of Scientific Computing in Computer Science, Technical University Munich, Munich, Bavaria, Germany; 3Imaging Technologies Laboratory, GE Global Research Niskayuna, NY, USA
We present a MRI simulation tool that combines MR system component with full MR application simulation. Transient simulations based on the finite element method (FEM) are utilized to obtain field information on the basis of computer assisted design (CAD) files and input those into a parallelized Bloch solver realized on a graphics-processing unit (GPU). Application related gradient are used as current input function to control the FEM simulation. Here, the basic components of the MR simulator together with speed up mechanisms such as adaptive time sampling, symmetry or parallelization are presented. Proof of principle is demonstrated by showing the results for a simplified MR system model.