Ingmar
Graesslin1, Shumin Wang2, Sven Biederer3,
Giel Mens4, Bjoern Annighoefer5, Hanno Homann1,
Jeff Duyn2, Paul Harvey4
1Philips Research Europe, Hamburg,
Germany; 2NINDS, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD,
United States; 3Institute of Medical Engineering, University of
Lbeck, Lbeck, Germany; 4Philips Healthcare, Best, Netherlands; 5TU
Hamburg-Harburg, Hamburg, Germany
In
parallel transmission, safety assessment via the specific absorption rate
(SAR) is non-trivial, since local SAR distributions depend on the individual
patient anatomy and on the multi-channel excitation. In general, patient
safety can be achieved by carrying out simulation-based SAR calculations and
by monitoring the deviation from the desired waveform. Typically, SAR
calculations rely on generic patient models and on evaluation of worst-case
scenarios. Patient-specific SAR calculations allow a more efficient
exploitation of the respective limits and can improve imaging performance.
This paper presents the general concept of patient-specific SAR calculations
and describes the implementation of the real-time SAR computation.