Detection & Countermeasures for RF Unsafe Conditions for MR-Conditional Devices

Ingmar Graesslin¹, Steffen Weiss¹, Emna Hassani¹, Kai Nehrke¹, Peter Vernickel¹, Sascha Krueger¹

Aging population causes an increasing demand for MR-examinations in patients wearing implants, which usually is a contra-indication for an MR examination. Previous work proposed to cancel planned scans if a reverse-polarization pre-scan detected a device or as soon as unsafe situations were detected by pick-up-coils. This work has the objective to detect unsafe RF coupling events to a device during an MR measurement and to change the scan-parameters of the parallel TX-system rather than terminating the scan. The aim is to re-establish a safe situation while trying to maintain image quality. The proposed approach was evaluated in phantom as well as volunteer studies.