Khaldoun Makhoul1, Yik-Kiong Hue1,
Lohith Kini2, Kawin Setsompop1, Joonsung Lee2,
Kyoko Fujimoto1, Elfar Adalsteinsson2,3,
1A. A. Martinos Center for Biomedical
Imaging, Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts
General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United States; 2Department of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States; 3Harvard-MIT Division of
Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, MA, United States
The
use of parallel transmission requires additional care to avoid exceeding
local SAR limits. SAR calculation must
be done for each RF pulse designed while the subject is in the scanner. An
integrated software tool for SAR monitoring provides a means of performing B1+
mapping, RF pulse design and SAR checking in a simple workflow, emphasizing
patient safety. Using pre-calculated E1 fields, and performing the
SAR calculation on a consumer-level graphics processor, computation times on
the order of minutes are achieved.