Julien Oster1, Raul Llinares2, Zion Tse3, Ehud Schmidt3, Gari Clifford1
1Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; 2Departamento de Comunicaciones, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain; 3Department of Radiology, Brigham & Womens Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
Electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings, required during MRI for both triggering and monitoring, are distorted by the MagnetoHydroDynamic (MHD) voltage induced from the blood flow through the aorta. The MHD effect makes clinical ECG analysis difficult and reduces triggering quality in high field MRI. We propose a MHD model, based on MRI blood flow measurements. The MHD induced body potential was computed with an aorta model of 15 cylindrical sections inside a torso model. The model exhibited a good consistency compared to a real MHD signal. The proposed MHD model may allow assessment of new ECG/MHD separation and denoising techniques.