Local Specific Absorption Rate Control for Parallel Transmission by Virtual Observation Points

The supervision of local specific absorption rate (SAR) in parallel transmission applications in MRI is crucial. One existing approach is to use electromagnetic simulations including human anatomical models and to precalculate the electric field distributions of each individual channel. These can be superposed later with respect to certain combined excitations under investigation, and the local SAR distribution can be evaluated. Local SAR maxima can be obtained by exhaustive search over all investigated subvolumes of the body model. Practical challenges arise for the adequate handling and comparing of precalculated field distributions as long as the expected combined radiofrequency excitations are still undetermined. Worst-case approximations for local SAR lead to significant radiofrequency pulse performance limitations. Optimizing local SAR in radiofrequency pulse design using constraints for each subvolume is impractical. A method is proposed to significantly reduce the complexity without restriction to particular radiofrequency excitations. By constructing several matrices, it becomes sufficient to consider only these so-called Virtual Observation Points for an adequate, conservative estimation of the maximum local SAR. The applied techniques involve concepts of vector optimization as well as semidefinite programming. Magn Reson Med 66:1468-1476, 2011. (C) 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.