Virtual observation point (VOP) compression has become a standard technique to address SAR and temperature constraints in MRI parallel transmission (pTx) design. SAR matrices need to be pre-averaged for the regions of interest, and finally be conservatively compressed to a much smaller set of SAR matrices (i.e. VOPs) that is still capable of reliably calculating a peak spatial SAR. We demonstrated a new approach that used a k-means algorithm for VOP compression. The new VOP compression method does not yield any under-estimation but allows for a lower over-estimation in the peak local SAR prediction.
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