Quality Assessment of B1-Based Local SAR Estimation As a Function of Position Within a Parallel Transmit Coil At 3T

Stefanie Buchenau¹, Martin Haas¹, Juergen Hennig¹, Maxim Zaitsev¹

Published methods for estimating specific absorption rate via post-processing of measured transmit fields are restricted to transmission and receive configurations in quadrature or RF shimming mode. Focusing on the challenge of estimating unknown magnetic field components within the present study an extension of the existing method is demonstrated to make it applicable to arbitrarily excited multi-transmit arrays. Based on simulations the quality of this extended method is investigated as a function of z position within a particular transmit array designed for parallel transmission experiments at 3T.